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Welcome back, Mr. Wick. Four years after " John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum ," director Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves have returned to theaters with "John Wick: Chapter 4," a film that was supposed to hit theaters almost two full years ago. Trust me. It was worth the wait. Stahelski and writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch have distilled the mythology-heavy approach of the last couple chapters with the streamlined action of the first film, resulting in a final hour here that stands among the best of the genre. 

"John Wick: Chapter 4" opens with its title character (Reeves) on the run again as the villainous Powers That Be known as the High Table get in his way. The main villain of the series is the Marquis de Gramont ( Bill Skarsgård ), a leader of the High Table who keeps raising the bounty on Wick's head while he also cleans up the messes left behind, including potentially eliminating Winston Scott ( Ian McShane ) and his part of this nefarious organization. The opening scenes take Wick to Japan, where he seeks help from the head of the Osaka Continental, Shimazu ( Hiroyuki Sanada ), and runs afoul of a blind High Table assassin named Caine (the badass Donnie Yen ). Laurence Fishburne pops up now and then as Wick's Q when the killer needs a new bulletproof suit, and Shamier Anderson plays an assassin who seems to be waiting for the price on Wick's head to hit the right level for him to get his payday. More than the last couple of films, the plot here, despite the movie's epic runtime (169 minutes), feels refreshingly focused again. Here's John Wick. Here are the bad guys. Go!

And go they do. Stahelski and his team construct action sequences in a manner that somehow feels both urgent and artistically choreographed at the same time. Filmmakers who over-think their shoot-outs often land on a tone that feels distant, lacking in stakes, and feeling more stylish than substantial. The great action directors figure out how to film combat in a way that doesn't sacrifice tension for showmanship. The action sequences in "John Wick: Chapter 4" are long battles, gun-fu shoot-outs between John and dozens of people who underestimate him, but they have so much momentum that they don't overstay their welcome. 

They also have wonderfully defined stakes. At one point in the film, John and an enemy decide on the parameters of a battle, including time, weapons, and variables. But this is really true of all the major action scenes, in which we very clearly understand what John needs to do and who he needs to go through to "finish the level." The simplicity of objectives allows for complex choreography. We know what needs to happen for John to keep pushing forward as he has since the beginning of the first film. So much modern action is cluttered with characters or muddled objectives, but the "Wick" films have such brilliant clarity of intention that they can then have fun within those simple constructs.

So much fun. The choreography of the action here can be simply breathtaking. I loved how often the world goes on around Wick and his unfortunate combatants. In a sequence that would be the best in almost any other recent action movie (but is like 3 rd or 4 th here), Wick has to battle a makeup-covered Scott Adkins and his army of unlucky idiots in a crowded nightclub. The dancers barely notice. They sometimes part a little bit to let them through, but they don't stop and stare. With water pouring into the club, the writhing, and dancing bodies make for such a visually inventive backdrop. Later, in one of my favorite action sequences of all time, Wick and his predators battle in the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe. The cars don't stop. In fact, it feels like they speed up. As shots ring out in the streets in this film, no one opens the window to see what the hell is going on. The world outside of Wick and the mythology of this world almost feels like they can't even see the legendary assassin and the hundred or so people he ends up killing. It's a fascinating, visually striking choice.

And then there's what I would call Action Geography. So many people have tried to mimic the frenetic approach of the "Bourne" movies, and the results have often been more incoherent than not. The amazing cinematographer Dan Laustsen (a regular Guillermo del Toro collaborator on " The Shape of Water ," " Nightmare Alley ," and more) works with Stahelski to make sure the action here is clean and brutal, never confusing. The stunt work is phenomenal, and, again, the shoot-outs have the feel of dance choreography more than the bland plot-pushing of so many studio films. There's just so much grace and ingenuity whenever Wick goes to work. 

Of course, a great cast helps too. Reeves might have fewer lines in this movie than any so far in the franchise, but he completely sells Wick's commitment while also imbuing him with emotional exhaustion that adds more gravity to this chapter. The vengeful Wick of the first film is a different one than the survivor three movies later, and Reeves knows exactly what this character needs. So many performers would add unnecessary touches to a character that's already this popular, but Reeves is smart about streamlining this performance to fit the film around him. It also allows for a few supporters to shine in different performance registers, especially Yen and Anderson. The legendary Yen is fantastic here, not just in combat but the moments in between. Most people who know who Donnie Yen is won't be surprised to hear that he fits in here perfectly, but he's even better than you expect. Anderson also gives a fun performance as a man who just seems to be a mercenary waiting for the right price, but fans of the series will note from the beginning that this badass has a dog, and this universe values puppies and people who love them.

The only minor flaw in Wick's armor here is a bit of narrative self-indulgence. There are a few scenes, especially early, when it feels like a beat is going on a bit too long, and I do think there's a slightly tighter (if you can say 150 minutes would be tight) version of this film that's simply perfect.

Fans won't care. Much has been made of what brings people out to theaters in the post-pandemic, streaming-heavy world, and this is a movie that should be seen with a cheering, excited crowd. It has that contagious energy we love in action films—a whole room of people marveling at the ingenuity and intensity of what's unfolding in front of them. It's a movie that's meant to be watched loud and big. John Wick has fought hard for it.

This review was filed from the North American premiere at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival. "John Wick: Chapter 4" opens on March 24 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

169 minutes

Keanu Reeves as John Wick

Donnie Yen as Caine

Ian McShane as Winston

Bill Skarsgård as Marquis de Gramont

Laurence Fishburne as Bowery King

Clancy Brown as The Harbinger

Hiroyuki Sanada as Shimazu

Lance Reddick as Charon

Shamier Anderson as Tracker

Rina Sawayama as Akira

Scott Adkins as Killa

Marko Zaror as Chidi

Natalia Tena as Katia

George Georgiou as The Elder

• Chad Stahelski

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Derek Kolstad
• Shay Hatten
• Michael Finch

Cinematographer

• Dan Laustsen
• Evan Schiff
• Tyler Bates
• Joel J. Richard

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‘john wick: chapter 4’ review: latest entry in keanu reeves franchise is pure, over-the-top action spectacle.

Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgard and Scott Adkins are among the newcomers for this new installment of the big-screen series about the hitman who just can't stay successfully retired.

By Frank Scheck

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The creatives behind the John Wick franchise must lose sleep at night thinking how they can outdo themselves with each new installment. If so, it makes a strong case for insomnia, since John Wick: Chapter 4 outdoes its formidable predecessors in nearly every respect.

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“The bloodshed in Osaka was not necessary,” one character observes after a typically violent melee in a luxury hotel that leaves scores dead and the premises practically in ruins. “The bloodshed was the point,” says another. And so it is with this hugely successful series featuring Keanu Reeves as the former hitman who thought he was out, only to be pulled back in, after his beloved puppy was killed in the first film. The bloodshed is the point — or, more accurately, the amazingly choreographed and photographed action sequences that make particular use of the combination of martial arts and gunplay battling known as “gun-fu.” This edition ups the ante further, with an impressively executed car chase/gun battle through the streets of Paris — including around the Arc de Triomphe — that brings “car-fu” into the violent mix.

Things aren’t going too well for the titular character as the film begins, which for him is not unusual. The High Table, that international criminal organization that seems to run the world, is out for his blood. To that end, their representative, the Marquis ( Bill Skarsgard , enjoyably playing a character only slightly less villainous than his Pennywise), puts a huge bounty on his head, attracting such freelance operatives as the Tracker (Shamier Anderson), who doesn’t go anywhere without his loyal, and very lethal, Belgian Malinois. The Marquis also hires the blind but no less dangerous Caine (Hong Kong superstar Donnie Yen ), a former friend of Wick’s who only accepts the assignment because the High Table will kill his daughter if he doesn’t.

Newcomers to the series would do well to do some research beforehand, because as the above summary indicates, mythology is a strong element. It could be argued that, like so many franchises dealing with fantasy worlds, the creators have gotten carried away with their convoluted constructs. I won’t make that argument, since I consider the elaborate world the John Wick films have created, which looks so much like ours, to be one of its most delicious elements. But you couldn’t blame repeat viewers watching the film later on via streaming for fast-forwarding through the talky parts to get to the action.

To recount the highlights of those elaborately staged set pieces would take up too much space, because there are so damn many of them. (Fourteen in all, according to the filmmakers. I can’t vouch for accuracy, since I lost count.) Besides the aforementioned car chase and hotel battle featuring guns, swords, bows and arrows, and a large variety of improvised weapons (a Wick specialty), there’s an amazing fight scene set in a water-drenched, multi-level nightclub featuring hundreds of revelers who barely notice the face-off between Wick and the gold-toothed Killa. The latter is played by action movie star and former MMA fighter Scott Adkins, amusingly outfitted with prosthetics and a huge bodysuit that somehow doesn’t hamper his fighting skills.

Director Chad Stahelski , who helmed all the previous films, and his formidable stunt team have outshone their previous work, and that’s saying something. These sequences play like the great dance numbers in old MGM musicals, complete with incredibly complicated, lengthy continuous shots that feature the full bodies of the performers rather than kinetically edited snippets of a gun here or a limb there. They’re so virtuosic you practically want to stand up and applaud when each one is over.   

Unlike so many films set in exotic locales that deliver a few establishing shots of local landmarks before filming in nondescript spots somewhere in Canada, John Wick: Chapter Four uses its many locations in Paris and Berlin to fantastic effect. A particular hoot are the scenes involving the dandyishly dressed Marquis, who only seems to conduct his business in such venues as the Paris Opera House and the Louvre, both of which he seems to have at his personal disposal.

Reeves, at one point outfitted with a Kevlar suit and shirt that enables him to get shot seemingly thousands of times without getting hurt (he uses the lapel like Dracula’s cape), commits so thoroughly to the role’s insane physical demands that he should get an award, if not for acting, then merely surviving. But he plays Wick so perfectly that he manages to rouse the audience merely with a passionately expressed “Yeah!”

Running nearly three hours, John Wick: Chapter 4 can certainly be accused of being too long. But I doubt many fans will be complaining.

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‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ Review: Keanu Reeves in a Three-Hour Action Epic That’s Like a Spaghetti Western Meets John Woo in Times Square

It's conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to "John Wick" fans, and on that level it succeeds.

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What no one could have anticipated is how well the counterintuitive casting worked. Reeves, an actor who even at his most stoic can’t hide his innate likability, was warmer than the role called for — and that’s just what made it connect. His John Wick was a savage badass looking into the abyss…with a quiver of decency. He started off as a noirish antihero, but with each film the series grew more grandiose, as Wick, his name a reference to his short fuse (but it’s also short for “wicked”), got elevated into a kind of superhero. He didn’t have unearthly powers, but he had the quality of invincibility, which is the only superpower you need. “John Wick: Chapter 2” and “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum” were styled as pulp revels, built around action set pieces that were now knowingly and gloriously over-the-top. It almost didn’t matter if the plot and dialogue were cut-rate. The fans experienced those scenes like drugs.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” is 2 hours and 49 minutes long, but it has a story that, if it were told more briskly, could fit into an 83-minute potboiler that you might have seen in a grindhouse in 1977. Yet the way that Chad Stahelski , the series’ stuntman-turned-director, has staged it, full of hushed, portentous, ritualistic verbal showdowns that are meant to be hypnotic as they build up to each new action scene, “Chapter 4” feels like the first “John Wick” movie that wants to be a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western. It’s like Sergio Leone crossed with John Woo as seen in Times Square.

The film completes the series’ cosmology with an elemental revenge-meets-liberation plot. Wick is still chained to his obligation to the High Table, the shadow-world consortium that controls…everything. Because of the high crime he committed at the Continental Hotel (a strict breach of High Table law), it’s as if he’s now under lifetime contract to the devil. But the devil has a face: It’s the Marquis de Gramont, a fascist preppie played by the baby-faced Bill Skarsgård (who’s like the young Matt Damon or Stephen Dorff as the world’s most entitled rich kid). And there’s a way out of the contract. Wick can challenge the Marquis to a duel to the death, which will take place at sunrise in front of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Paris.

Is “Chapter 4” too long? You bet it is. At moments, it’s like the action film as liturgical church service. Yet the movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to “John Wick” fans, and on that level it succeeds. The Marquis keeps trying to assassinate Wick before the morning of the duel, and this results in several delectable fight sequences. One is set in the middle of the speeding centrifugal traffic that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe, one is shot thrillingly from an overhead doll’s-house view, and then there’s the spectacular climax, which unfolds on the Rue Foyatier in Montmartre, the 222-step stairway that leads to the Basilica. With Wick spinning into action (and, at one point, rolling down the entire flight), it becomes an exhilarating stairway to hell, one that winds up delivering John Wick to the gratifying karmic destination he has spent this series earning.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, March 8, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 169 MIN.

• Production: A Lionsgate release of a Summit Entertainment, Thunder Road Pictures, 87Eleven Productions production. Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee, Chad Stahelski. Executive producers: Keanu Reeves, Louise Rosner, David Leitch, Michael Paseornek.
• Crew: Director: Chad Stahelski. Screenplay: Shay Hatten, Michael French. Camera: Dan Laustsen. Editor: Nathan Orloff. Music: Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard.
• With: Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Lance Reddick, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, Clancy Brown, Ian McShane, Marko Zazor, Natalia Tena.

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John Wick: Chapter 4 Reviews

Chad Stahelski’s opera of violence is one of the most artistically stirring movies of 2023.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2024

The John Wick universe is a complex blend of gun violence, vague religious imagery, and some of the best dog actors around, and the fourth installment brought the action to a new level.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2024

John Wick: Chapter 4 really is a visual spectacular. With amazing fight sequences and a storyline that never signposts or becomes predictable this film is a film that deserves more credit than most will give it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 19, 2023

Yes, Donnie Yen plays another blind character (my theory is that filmmakers do this because nobody would buy that a Donnie Yen with two functioning eyes could ever lose a fight).

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 8, 2023

You might have seen some of it before, but it has never been as big and brash as it is in this chapter... an action epic for the ages.

Full Review | Sep 6, 2023

Genuine cinematic poetry.

Full Review | Sep 3, 2023

John Wick 4 is the ultimate action movie.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

The action is fluid and all-consuming and makes it easy to overlook some of the story’s shortcomings (too many new threads, not so seamlessly woven in).

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 16, 2023

It is an incredible ride that is designed to entertain from the opening moments and the best way to enjoy it is to just hang on.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 9, 2023

This series always did a stellar job of not turning John Wick into a robotic machine, and Reeves always maintained a depth to this haunted character. The tenderness of a classically Reeves-ian performance is what is missing in John Wick: Chapter 4.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 9, 2023

They understand that it is the characters, the humour, and the jaw-dropping action that keeps us coming back for more. And as long as they keep this up, even in the form of spin-offs, audiences will continue to lap it up.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 29, 2023

John Wick: Chapter 4 delivers a satisfying conclusion to an outstanding action franchise that never fails to impress with its stylish action sequences and portrayal of an intriguing world of assassins and codes of conduct.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.75/5 | Jul 26, 2023

Joins both Mad Max and Mission: Impossible in the action franchise hall of fame in the wing of films that somehow keep getting more thrilling and more beautiful to look at amidst the ballet of carnage in its breathless set pieces.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 26, 2023

John Wick: Chapter 4 concludes the game-changing saga with a relentless, ruthless action masterclass that ultimately justifies its epic length.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 25, 2023

"John Wick: Chapter 4" is the best entry since the original, and it knows the mileage on John's soul is starting to reveal itself more and more. So, it smartly plans for a narrative exit ramp.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Keanu Reeves and Chad Stahelski return with trusted collaborators to their neon labyrinth featuring elevated action and a cast of adversaries and allies to create the most John Wick film in the franchise.

The entire series is a sisyphean journey of revenge. The audience knows that John Wick (Keanu Reeves) can never be free from this life of an assassin. He’s doomed to climb that 222-step staircase to Sacre-Cœur in Paris, both physically and metaphorically.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

A Bonafide Action MASTERPIECE. Cementing John Wick as one of the greatest Action Franchises of all time. Once you think you’ve seen the coolest sequence it only gets better up until the final 30 minutes which completely had my jaw on the floor.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 24, 2023

With John Wick Chapter 4, Chad Stahelski crafts a grand sculpture of gunplay, feverishly yet methodically chiseled until its ultimate, explosive completion. A violent, ferocious symphony that encapsulates the very reason why we go to the movies.

From the cinematography, an atmospheric score in all the right places, to a powerful conclusion in Wick’s personal’s story – it ends the franchise in the best way it ever could.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2023

• Movie Review

John Wick: Chapter 4 is unrelenting in every sense of the word

John wick 4 is a supersized all-you-can-eat buffet of the franchise’s signature dishes: bullet-riddled revenge, teeth-chattering action sequences, and gossamer-thin characters..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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Lionsgate’s John Wick movies have always been over-the-top action / thriller joyrides more focused on dazzling you with visceral, expertly choreographed action sequences than trying to tell the most coherent stories about stylish assassins . Director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 4 is no exception. And it abundantly delivers on the franchise’s hallmarks — snazzy guns, lovable dogs, and one very haggard man in black — by picking up right where 2019’s John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum left off.

Were this just any old chapter in the John Wick saga, it’d be fair to call the newest film slightly above average compared to its predecessors — and a testament to how far the franchise has come. But John Wick: Chapter 4 wants to be as monumental and seminal as it is bombastic — aspirations that the feature doesn’t quite manage to achieve despite giving it its best shot.

After three films of simply wanting to be left the hell alone, then wanting revenge, wanting to be left alone some more, and then being forced to go on the run, dog-loving widower and super-assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is tired but still very intent on making sure that the High Table gets what’s coming to it for trying to kill him. John Wick: Chapter 4 presumes Parabellum is still fresh in your mind as it immediately drops you right back into Wick’s jet-setting life of journeying to far-off places and popping off as many shots as it takes until his various targets are chock full of bullet wounds and quite dead.

With Wick still running around the world and demolishing virtually every single person who crosses his path, the High Table’s powers that be have every reason to be scared that he’ll find them and put them in the ground. That fear is what pushes the shadowy organization to start making the bold changes that set John Wick: Chapter 4 ’s story in motion.

Though John Wick’s just a man, Chapter 4 leans into the idea of him being the man (in black) — an assassin so clad in plot armor that he simply can’t be killed by conventional means or by following the ancient rules that made the High Table into the thriving operation that it is.

The Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård) isn’t just another trained killer gunner for Wick’s head. He’s a high-ranking High Table member who speaks for the entire organization when he lets Wick’s longtime allies Winston Scott (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick) know that their ties to him will bring nothing but ruin into their lives. But John Wick: Chapter 4 also frames the Marquis as the High Table’s destructive arbiter of change — an embodiment of the future clashing with the past — and the existential fear he elicits in his fellow killers is one of the more interesting elements of the film.

The Marquis also gives Wick a singular convenient target to focus on as he works toward making the High Table pay for what it’s done to him and giving him back his freedom. But between Wick and the Marquis are hundreds, if not thousands, of trained killers, like blind swordsman Caine (Donnie Yen) dead set on collecting the ever-increasing bounty looming over the excommunicado-ed man’s head.

When Chapter 4 ’s purely focused on detailing how Wick methodically mows down his pursuers, you can feel just how in their elements stuntman-turned-director Stahelski and Reeves are. But in its many moments where the movie’s either building up to or cooling down from its big set pieces, there’s both a wobbliness and a narrative thinness that ends up highlighting how overlong and somewhat repetitive Chapter 4 ultimately feels.

While Chapter 4 does eventually pit Wick against the Marquis, it’s only after the former goes on a globe-trekking journey to get all the right tools and make the right alliances to be able to challenge the High Table head-on. Wick’s quest takes him to a Japanese branch of the Continental run by series newcomers Koji Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama) — neither of whom know what to make of the mysterious Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson), a notebook-toting tracker who travels with a German shepherd.

Because Chapter 4 ’s really about contemplating the future, and because the movie couldn’t just be about Wick taking on the world, all of the new faces are welcome additions. Both Sawayama and Anderson are captivating as two of the movie’s most distinct, personality-forward fighters who — because of their charisma and solid acting choices — stand out in sprawling fight sequences overstuffed with large groups of stunt performers brawling. But John Wick: Chapter 4 spends so much of its 169-minute runtime focused on Wick doing things we’ve seen him do a few times over at this point that few of the movie’s characters end up feeling like real people.

The John Wick movies are about action first, character second, and plot maybe fourth, after tailored suits, but there is so little depth to a lot of the Shay Hatten and Michael Finch script that even John Wick himself sometimes comes across as if he isn’t sure why he’s fighting or how he feels about it. As with the previous John Wick movies, Chapter 4 ’s prolonged fight scenes are kinetic, brutally beautiful odes to the art of stunt work, and each feels crafted with diehard fans of the franchise in mind. But the film’s approach to fan service — letting less action-filled scenes run more than a bit too long and making sure that almost every one of its background fistfights gets ample screen time — has the effect of making John Wick: Chapter 4 feel needlessly drawn out.

The ability of the John Wick movies to make you feel the blows as you watch Wick take and dole out beatings is one of the more impressive things about them, and it’s something Chapter 4 ’s able to do well to a point. But the movie is so chock full of battles that feel like they were stuffed into the movie to make it bigger that they start to mean less as the story unfolds and the body count rises.

The movie’s length also has an interesting way of emphasizing just how little John Wick actually says, which has a curious way of making him seem a bit checked out and disengaged from the people around him, who all speak almost exclusively in grim aphorisms. But Reeves’ aloof deadpan does work as a counterbalance to Chapter 4 ’s forays into goofy physical comedy. Some of them work, like a scene involving Wick fighting his way up a flight of stairs and then falling back down it. But others, like Wick’s fight with an obese High Table head from Germany named Killa (portrayed by Scott Adkins in a fat suit), do not — and come across as cringe at best, mean-spirited at worst.

John Wick: Chapter 4 isn’t a movie you casually sit down to watch apropos of nothing. It’s a commitment, both in terms of how long it is and in how invested you really have to be in the idea of John Wick for the film to be engaging. To its credit, John Wick: Chapter 4 does an admirable job of leaving open possibilities for a future filled with stories of some of the movie’s new supporting characters. It comes as a pleasant surprise given how much time this story spends trying to remind you that Wick is the baddest man in town.

John Wick: Chapter 4 also stars Laurence Fishburne, Clancy Brown, Natalia Tena, Marko Zaror, Bridget Moynahan, and George Georgiou. The movie hits theaters on March 24th.

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‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ Review: There Will Be Blood, Yeah

In the latest and longest movie set in Wick World, Keanu Reeves’s titular assassin visits Paris and paints the town red.

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By Manohla Dargis

A vulgar pleasure of the “John Wick” series is that it aestheticizes violence without the usual blah-blah rationales and appeals to conscience. At once basic and off-the-charts nuts, each movie — the fourth opens this week — centers on a laconic assassin with a hazy back story and extraordinary skills. A virtuoso of death, Wick (Keanu Reeves) has his reasons, or so the series insists, but he kills because it is what he does. It’s his thing. “Deserves got nothing to do with it,” as Clint Eastwood says in “Unforgiven.”

Eastwood is in the DNA of the “Wick” series — and in the way Reeves deliberately draws out the word yeah — and so too are Jean-Pierre Melville, Jackie Chan, Buster Keaton, John Woo, Fred Astaire, “ Point Blank ,” the Three Stooges and “ Get Carter .” That said, the overall story is stripped down to the point of minimalism, especially when compared to the average superhero bloat-a-thon. In the first Wick movie, the assassin resumes his bloody ways after gangsters kill his puppy — a gift from his dead wife — and steal his car. Before long, he has antagonized his former employers, a villainous syndicate called the High Table.

Despite its seemingly Hobbesian aspect, Wick World does have rules, and by the second movie, the character is declared “excommunicado,” a word that underscores the High Table’s profile as a shadowy, quasi-religious elite manifestation of absolute power. The conceit of an all-knowing, all-seeing group of underworld puppet-masters is primo movieland conspiracy-theory and very of the moment; it’s silly, nebulously political, and it gives viewers wide latitude to interpret the movie however they prefer — or they can just groove on the plush trappings, exotic locations, exploding heads and bodies in glorious motion.

The series’s director, Chad Stahelski, is a stunt veteran (he’s doubled for Reeves), so he understandably likes to show off bodies as they move — pivot, soar and fall — in space. He uses plenty of close-ups and medium shots, but he also likes to pull back for full-figure framing à la Astaire. This allows you to see and luxuriate in the performers’ physicality, in their grace and steely power, as well as to appreciate the geometry and precision of the fight choreography. This focus underscores the frailty and impermanence of these bodies, their humanness, especially Wick’s as this seemingly invincible man is repeatedly brutalized.

Written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch, “John Wick: Chapter 4” pretty much plays out like the previous movies, though at a generally fast-moving 169 minutes it’s longer. Even so, it rarely drags because there’s relatively little dialogue and down time. For the most part, Wick chases or is chased by other assassins, shooting and stabbing, grappling and grunting in a series of visually distinct, meticulously staged and filmed set pieces. Every so often, he confers with old comrades, notably the sonorous, bassy trio of Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne and Lance Reddick ( who recently died ), performers who add luster and history to the series with their singular faces, hard-boiled résumés and perfectly tuned arch deliveries.

There are new faces, among them cautious friendlies (Hiroyuki Sanada, Rina Sawayama), sympathetic combatants (Donnie Yen, Shamier Anderson) and another filthy-rich villain (Bill Skarsgard), a Euro-trashy baddie with bespoke glittery suits and a taste for torture and classical music. The series has expanded its New York-centric geographical coordinates, and while it jumps to the Middle East, Japan and Europe, it continues to stick close to its circumscribed template. So, the High Table’s tattooed minions in pencil skirts are back. There’s yet another dog and another elaborate sequence at a crowded dance club (the streets are empty by comparison) but, crucially, still no sign of the modern surveillance state.

The constraints of Wick World put it safely on the side of full-blown fantasy, giving the series the feel of a grim fairy tale. It might seem like a distorted mirror of our world, but what’s notable are all the ways it’s different from ours — not just in its depiction of power but also of violence, which, for all the arterial spray, is as untethered from reality as it is in zombie flicks. When Wick faces off against challengers at the Arc de Triomphe in “Chapter 4,” there are no gendarmes, no blaring sirens or screaming bystanders to interrupt the kinetic flow. There is simply and once again Reeves, the axis who centers this franchise with his grave sincerity, beatific glow and mesmerizing, rooted fighting style, with its heavy-footed solidity and surprising suppleness. No matter what happens, nothing ever feels as poignantly at stake here as Reeves’s own ravaged, beautiful, aging body.

There are offscreen stakes, of course, starting at the box office, but central to this series’ appeal is how it reminds you of the real world — through the years between sequels and Reeves’s gray hairs — even as it remains insistently apart from reality’s messiness, its confusions, existential terrors, corporate overlords and unspeakable ordinary brutality. Life for many in Wick World is, to borrow Hobbes’s formulation, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” but it’s also sentimental and filled with friendships or at least alliances. It’s also reassuringly ordered, never more so than in its violence, which in Wick World is pure, eye-popping, body-shaking, transporting entertainment, something that (to borrow from another philosopher ) has a good beat and you can dance to.

John Wick: Chapter 4 Rated R for the usual bang-bang, stab-stab. Running time: 2 hours 49 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ Review: The Best Action Blockbuster Since ‘Fury Road’

Rafael motamayor.

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The “John Wick” franchise has evolved from a small-scale tale of revenge for the death of a wife and the killing of a do  to a globe-trotting epic that spans continents, dozens of characters, and an intricate mythology. In its fourth chapter, director Chad Stahelski and star Keanu Reeves bring this franchise back to its roots while expanding the world and the story to bigger and bolder places. The result is not only the best movie in the franchise, but the best American action blockbuster since George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

After going to war with essentially the entire world, and causing the deaths of hundreds of people, “Chapter 4” finally starts pondering the question of just how far John Wick is willing to go for revenge, how many people close to him he’s willing to endanger, and whether it was all worth it. At this point, this is no longer about the killing of his wife and dog, it’s about burning down a system that always resented Wick for abandoning it.

The problem is that now, John Wick’s friends and acquaintances are paying the price of his little insurrection. This starts with the closure and then destruction of the Continental Hotel by the enigmatic High Table, who have now resorted to hiring The Marquis. This is Bill Skarsgård doing his best French Joker, playing the Marquis as a ruthless, often hilarious, always chaotic and intelligent villain.

Like with every film in the series, “ John Wick: Chapter 4 ” adds to its ludicrously complex mythology, introducing new rules to the High Table’s command, new sections of the franchise’s secret world of assassins, and new unique characters. There’s Shamier Anderson’s Mr. Nobody, a tracker who knows exactly where John Wick will be next but waits patiently until his bounty is large enough to be worth it to him, and who is always accompanied by a faithful (and scene-stealer) German Shepherd. While the film goes bigger in scope, it also manages to stay fairly grounded in the idea of relationships, focusing on John Wick and his allies and friends, such as Winston — who take on a larger role this time around — or Wick’s former friend, Caine.

Caine is the best character in the film, with Donnie Yen bringing his martial arts superstardom to the “John Wick” universe with an intimidating yet charismatic blind assassin with a similar backstory to Wick, who is forced to hunt him at the request of the High Table. Even when he’s not fighting, Yen steals every scene he’s in, even by just slurping on noodles while his henchmen die all around him, or when he uses Wifi-controlled doorbells to track his enemies.

Creator Derek Kolstad steps down as the screenwriter of the film, leaving scribe duties entirely to the co-writer of the previous entry in the franchise, Shay Hatten, as well as Michael Finch. Despite the long running time, “John Wick: Chapter 4” has impeccable pacing. It never drags, but feels tightly focused, and manages to develop even the new supporting cast, like Rina Sawayama’s assassin Akira — a standout — or Scott Adkins having the time of his life as a German assassin covered in heavy prosthetics. It also helps that this chapter in the story is almost non-stop action, having each of the film’s three acts revolving around breathtaking set piece after breathtaking set piece — each with its own enemies, weapons, and sets.

Indeed, the best way to describe “John Wick: Chapter 4” is that it often feels like watching “Mad Max: Fury Road” and marveling at how they pulled that movie off without killing half the crew. As mentioned, each set takes advantage of the different locations and crews to deliver wholly unique fight scenes, and like in every movie of the franchise, it continues to be a delight to see Keanu Reeves’ John Wick constantly be out of breath, knocked down, and then beaten up before he stands back up. The last arc, in particular, should be placed in the Louvre, with a fight in the middle of a transited Arc de Triomphe.

And yet, as cool as it is to see a vulnerable John Wick, he still needs a few gadgets. Clear among them, however, is his superpowered magical suit that seems to completely deflect bullets, which turns the characters into superheroes about as actually vulnerable as a cartoon character. It never stops being a bit too ridiculous to see these assassins cover their face with their suits and just not take any damage — just as John Wick is now apparently immune to pain from being hit by a car — but it is easy to let this slide when the action scenes are so good.

Returning cinematographer Dan Laustsen continues to really understand and utilize neon blues and reds, but he also gives us an incredible fight done as a one-liner with an overhead shot that makes the scene look like the “Hotline Miami” video game.

We’re four movies in, and about to get spin-offs. This is a movie that looks not forward toward some cash-grab sequel, but toward the past and how we got here. Whether he gets out alive or dead, John Wick has to start thinking about where this quest leads, where the road built on all the dead bodies he’s been laying in front of him leads. The answer is surprisingly meditative and poignant, one that makes this the most emotionally resonant movie of the franchise.

The “John Wick” saga has changed and evolved throughout the years, For this film, there is no denying how it has made Chad Stahelski one of our best action filmmakers, and how the franchise gave Keanu yet another career-redefining role. It’s been a wild ride, and one of the best and most consistent movie series ever. No matter where the roads lead, however, “I’m thinking John Wick is back.”

“John Wick: Chapter 4” premiered at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival. Lionsgate will release it in theaters on Friday, March 24.

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John Wick: Chapter 4 First Reviews: The Best in the Franchise, with Epic Wall-to-Wall Action

Critics say the latest john wick adventure might be the best action film of the year, full of spectacular thrills, memorable supporting performances, and at least one set piece you won't forget..

Here’s what critics are saying about John Wick: Chapter 4 :

Where does it rank in the franchise?

John Wick: Chapter 4 outdoes its formidable predecessors in nearly every respect. –  Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

John Wick: Chapter 4 once again exceeds expectations. –  Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

It is the most John Wick movie. And it is the best John Wick movie. –  Tom Jorgensen, IGN Movies

John Wick: Chapter 4 takes cinema to the next level once again. –  Fred Topel, United Press International

There’s a strong argument to be made that it’s the best of the sequels. –  Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

It may not be consistent enough to rank as the franchise’s finest, but when it gets going, it cooks with gas. –  Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

In this gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well. –  Derek Smith, Slant Magazine

(Photo by ©Lionsgate)

Will it go down as one of the best action movies ever?

John Wick: Chapter 4 is one of the best modern American action films this side of a Mission: Impossible . –  Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

John Wick: Chapter 4 stands above… the past decade’s worth of action films as a whole. – Tom Jorgensen, IGN Movies

This fourth adventure — like those that preceded it — thrillingly and savagely slays its modern action competition. – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

John Wick: Chapter 4 is one of the best action movies of the past few years. –  JimmyO, JoBlo’s Movie Network

John Wick: Chapter 4 boasts truly innovative action — not only by the standards of the John Wick series, but also for all of cinema. – Fred Topel, United Press International

This is sure to become a highly rewatched, often quoted classic. –  Alan French, Sunshine State Cineplex

What other movies could we compare it to?

John Wick: Chapter 4 feels like the first John Wick movie that wants to be a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western. It’s like Sergio Leone crossed with John Woo. –  Owen Gleiberman, Variety

It fits in with the likes of Leone, Walter Hill, John Woo, and George Miller. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

It is near non-stop wall-to-wall combat, car chases, and shoot-outs on a level not seen since Mad Max: Fury Road . –  Karl Delossantos, Smash Cut Reviews

It’s the best American action blockbuster since George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road . –  Rafael Motamayor, IndieWire

(Photo by Murray Close/©Lionsgate)

Does Chad Stahelski outdo himself?

Chad Stahelski has once again delivered the goods and then some. –  Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture

Director Chad Stahelski, who helmed all the previous films, and his formidable stunt team have outshone their previous work, and that’s saying something. – Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

John Wick: Chapter 4 strongly suggests that he is the finest Hollywood director of gun battles, fist fights, sword duels, and car chases working at the moment. –  Jacob Hall, Slashfilm

Throughout John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski has been flexing his directorial muscles with extended action scenes that have a visual style and cohesion that highlights how he’s become one of the best action filmmakers in the world. And then in the wild finale, Stahelski pulls out all the stops. –  Sean Mulvihill, Mulviews

Chad Stahelski lacks the showman’s instinct for building and payoff. –  Charles Bramesco, Guardian

So the action is good?

Stunt coordinator Scott Rogers makes a bombastic return, choreographing the most bonkers fight sequences ever to hit the silver screen. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

John… participates in perhaps the greatest action sequence of all time. – Karl Delossantos, Smash Cut Reviews

The action in John Wick: Chapter 4 is out of this world fantastic. – Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture

Between the range of action we see, the creativity of the various settings and set pieces, and the way Reeves acts all through it, it’s a true wonder to behold. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

Every action scene in John Wick: Chapter 4 could be the climax of any other movie. There is no small fight in this movie. – Fred Topel, United Press International

The final hour of the film is essentially one large action scene, and one staged with such bravura skill and visual wit that it exposes the vast majority of American action direction as the lazy sham it is. – Jacob Hall, Slashfilm

Does it get a little ridiculous?

This is a nutso film packed with over-the-top characters, on-the-nose line readings, and skewed levels of plausibility that rival the Fast & Furious franchise. However, once again, this series stays true to itself. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

It is patently ridiculous and mostly very fun: the platonic ideal of a globe-hopping meatbag action thriller taken to its gloriously illogical extreme. –  Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

The action in John Wick movies wouldn’t seem out of place in Looney Tunes . For Chapter 4 , the filmmakers seem in on the joke though as there’s a playfulness to the set pieces. –  Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

With a willingness to use slapstick in the middle of action beats, John Wick: Chapter 4 is maybe the funniest entry in the series. –  Brandon Zachary, CBR.com

Is there more to enjoy than just the action?

The secret weapon of the John Wick films has always been the emotion that fuels John… The fact that this latest film ends in such a character-focused way inspires awe of a different, incredibly welcome kind. – Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture

Director Chad Stahelski and screenwriters Shay Hatten and Michael Finch carry through themes surrounding consequence and the passage of time while also strengthening them with added sentiments on absolution, fate, fidelity and friendship. –  Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

This is a movie that looks not forward toward some cash-grab sequel, but toward the past and how we got here… [It’s] the most emotionally resonant movie of the franchise. – Rafael Motamayor, IndieWire

How does the movie look?

This movie is gorgeous. It’s a symphony of violence, wonderfully captured by cinematographer Dan Lausten… Every shot of this film has something going on. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

For a series which has always looked stylish as hell, Chapter 4 sets a new standard for production design and cinematography. – Tom Jorgensen, IGN Movies

Cinematographer Dan Laustsen’s lush visuals makes sure the film is dazzling to look at even when there isn’t any action happening. – Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture

Through cinematographer Dan Laustsen’s lens, the saturated colorscape burns vivid and vibrant. He captures an incredibly seductive depth of field with the imagery, making the characters and action pop. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

What about Keanu Reeves’ performance?

Reeves truly continues to impress, seemingly getting better at this stuff with each franchise. –  Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

Keanu Reeves continues his action-hero dominance with another incredibly physical, supernaturally charismatic performance that pushes the boundaries of what any actor should be willing to put themselves through but he seems to take great pleasure in with tremendous skill. – Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture

Reeves does solid work bringing out flashes of humanity and exhaustion in the character, even as he dispatches untold numbers of enemies through plenty of amazing stunt work. – Brandon Zachary, CBR.com

Reeves might have fewer lines in this film than any so far in the franchise, but he completely sells Wick’s commitment while also imbuing him with emotional exhaustion that adds more gravity to this chapter. –  Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com

How is the film’s villain?

Skarsgård builds depth and dimension into his ostentatious, arrogant, weaselly baddie. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

While Skarsgård’s Gramont is an arrogant upper-cruster who likes to hold court in the Louvre and the Paris Opera House, he’s more of a functional than unique villain. – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

What lets Chapter 4 down is its central villain. Bill Skarsgård is entertaining… but there’s no development there. – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

Does anyone in the cast stand out?

Donnie Yen delivers such a physically witty and charismatic performance that you can’t wait for the inevitable spinoff. – Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

The legendary Donnie Yen gives a brilliant performance and effortlessly steals scenes as Caine. –  Simon Thompson, The Playlist

Honorable mention to Scott Adkins, whose scene-stealing turn as a purple-clad, poker-playing gangster with chrome-plated front teeth deserves its own spinoff. –  Brent Hankins, The Lamplight Review

Shamier Anderson, playing a new character… is destined to be a fan-favorite (and whose loyal dog nearly walks away with the movie). –  Jacob Hall, Slashfilm

Anderson steals the film during several scenes… It’s a star-making supporting role, and we would love to see him headline his own franchise in the near future. – Alan French, Sunshine State Cineplex

Rina Sawayama is an absolute firecracker in her film debut. – Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture

Ian McShane and Lance Reddick are given their moments to shine. They both make a meal out of their screen time. –  Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Will we feel the runtime?

At just hair under three hours, John Wick: Chapter 4 is indulgent for sure, but it’s earned the running time at this point. – Jacob Hall, Slashfilm

John Wick: Chapter 4 can certainly be accused of being too long. But I doubt many fans will be complaining. – Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

Is Chapter 4 too long? You bet it is… yet the movie is conceived as a knowingly overstuffed gift to John Wick fans, and on that level it succeeds. –  Owen Gleiberman, Variety

In an age of increased grumbling about films with two-plus-hour runtimes, Chapter 4’ s roaring pace serves as a counter argument that proclaims movies should be as long as they need to be. – Tom Jorgensen, IGN Movies

Don’t let the length fool you; John Wick: Chapter 4 may be the most exhilarating two-hour and thirty-eight minutes you’ll spend in theaters this year. – JimmyO, JoBlo’s Movie Network

I do think there’s a slightly tighter (if you can say 150 minutes would be tight) version of this film that’s simply perfect. – Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com

John Wick: Chapter 4 opens in theaters everywhere on March 24, 2023.

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John Wick: Chapter 4 review: Keanu Reeves wins again with a potent blend of compelling grace and raw brutality

Sprawling action sequences overpower a bloated story in the latest high-powered john wick installment.

“Have you given any thought to how this ends?” asks a character early on in John Wick: Chapter 4 , the latest installment in the little action franchise that could, in which each sequel has virtually doubled the theatrical gross of its predecessor. And the answer is yes. While it would be easy to indulge a view of this Keanu Reeves series as one defined by up-the-ladder villains, the world of John Wick—a retired hitman pulled back into lethal old ways after his deceased wife’s posthumous gift, a puppy, is murdered during a home invasion—has been constructed as something at once labyrinthine, yet fairly simple.

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Despite all their elaborate trappings, in which the façade of a modern New York actually masks a secret universe of criminal enterprises with a proper respect for rules, and special luxury hotels that serve as a neutral ground for killers and thieves, the Wick films can basically be distilled to fist-forward disquisitions on the debate over fate and self-determination, and to a slightly lesser extent service versus self-interest. Are characters making decisions because of their inherent nature, or choosing a course of action with complete clarity about the (often quite bloody) consequences? Are they serving someone else, or only pretending to do so?

The weighty nature of those complicated questions finally comes to a head in this sprawling sequel, a plus-sized affair (at 169 minutes) whose general thematic payoffs, along with justifiably accrued franchise goodwill, seem to account for at least a measure of its predictably rapturous reception at the recent SXSW Film Festival.

Picking up after the events of the third film, this chapter finds Wick, after recuperating with the assistance of the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), tracking down the Elder, the only person who sits above the High Table, a council of high-level crime bosses. His actions, however, have consequences—and those ramifications rain down with immediacy upon Winston Scott (Ian McShane) and Shimazu Koji (Hiroyuki Sanada), managers of the Continental Hotel branches in New York and Osaka, respectively.

As Wick copes with assassins sent by a senior member of the High Table, the Marquis Vincent de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), he also finds himself locking wits with a mysterious and independent-minded tracker who calls himself Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson). The body count stacks up, of course, but Wick is eventually presented with a work-around that Winston points out will give him a chance at what he claims to want: a definitive way out, a brokered truce.

With the proper membership and endorsement of a High Table family, Wick can request a formal duel with de Gramont. This choice puts Wick on a path against an old friend and mentor, blind assassin Caine (Donnie Yen, a welcome franchise addition), who is beholden to the High Table for his own not-so-complicated reasons.

Returning director Chad Stahelski , who has helmed all four Wick films, again applies his rich experience as a stuntman to the movie’s action sequences. This, after all, is the meat-and-potatoes appeal of the franchise. Stahelski’s exacting sense of choreography is perhaps most on display in an extended single-take sequence shot from above, surveying mayhem across multiple rooms.

Part of the strength of the series, and especially the sequels, has always been the marriage of its form and content—the design of stylish, saturated, sometimes neon-tinged modern paintings which come to brutal, bloody life as Wick whirls around, dispatching a swarm of enemies. Working again with Oscar-nominated Dan Laustsen (cinematographer on the last three movies), Stahelski serves up a somewhat mixed bag.

A club scene in which Wick grapples with German High Table member Killa (martial arts actor Scott Adkins, in a fat suit that makes him look like a stand-in for Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobblepot), recalls another club sequence from the original movie, but to less engaging effect. It also introduces distraction when considering the reactions of various club patrons to wild violence and gunfire unfolding around them.

Much better is an early Osaka sequence involving Caine, Koji, Wick and others, in which the former imaginatively uses motion detectors and echo location to set up opponents for both blows and thrusts of a blade. The most memorable moments, though, arrive late in the film. As Wick makes preparation for a sunrise duel, he’s beset upon by hordes of thugs seeking to collect a bounty on his head, and has to do battle with seemingly half of Paris on the city streets. It’s basically Frogger re-conceived as a combined shootout and intense hand-to-hand combat scene. Later, in a scene which reimagines Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy hallway fight on an incline, Wick has to punch and shoot his way up a lengthy, outdoor path of concrete stairs. Various payoffs here are among the movie’s biggest audience-pleasing bits.

As an actor, Reeves is a bit of a Rorschach test; what some deride or ding, others find reward in. Few can reasonably take issue with the mesmeric physicality he brings to the Wick films—a compelling blend of grace and raw brutishness. But the emotionality he brings to the character of Wick is an under-appreciated element of the franchise’s success. From the first film, for anyone invested in this series, the searing pain of receiving the puppy and the simple note from his wife and the snarling rage of his low-ground threat to Russian crime boss Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) still linger. Reeves solemnly tries to invest some of the material with deeper currents, but there are unfortunately no scripted moments of comparable emotional mooring here.

For all its extensive world-building, and the ways in which its characters and their choices feel like they track and fit together sensibly, this chapter drops the ball a bit with regards to coloring in the learned lessons of its protagonist’s journey. (Screenwriters Shay Hatten and Michael Finch sub in for Derek Kolstad, who wrote the first two films and co-wrote the third.) Some attempts at these resolutions lie in counterpoint, with characters like Caine and Mr. Nobody. But there are multiple missed opportunities to sketch out and wring emotion from Wick’s deep brokenness, and the causal-loop nature of his dilemma, in which every avenging murder has only brought him more enemies.

The film cries out for moments of quiet and reflection amid the din. The filmmakers try to touch on this with Mr. Nobody’s dog, but a conversation with Winston and the Bowery King about gravestone markers, for example, just comes off as clumsy.

As a hitman, Wick is a solitary and private figure, so these realizations need to reflect that interior nature. Why not a daisy, or any number of other small moments or markers glimpsed along the way that highlight Wick’s loss and emptiness, as well as his perhaps changing relationship with those intense feelings?

Though it certainly checks the portion-size box, John Wick: Chapter 4 is not a bad or mindless reserving of only orgiastic action excess. But neither is it entirely successful in what it so clearly aims to do, on a story level. Rather, the film illustrates the inherent difficulties in successfully serving multiple (narrative, in this case) masters. In the end, maybe that’s fitting for the John Wick franchise, an entertaining and somewhat unlikely series long poised between the expansive and the intimate.

John Wick: Chapter 4 opens in theaters on March 24

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘John Wick: Chapter 4’: Longer, bloodier and better than ever

The fourth installment in the martial arts action franchise ups the ante, with stunning set pieces of fight choreography.

Is “John Wick: Chapter 4” the best John Wick movie in the franchise, as early reviews suggest ?

Quite possibly. But what does that even mean? Readers who have never seen Keanu Reeves as John Wick, who don’t even like violent action movies — especially not ones about an elite assassin in a fantastical hierarchy of three-piece-suited assassins that is run like an efficient corporation, on the run from his co-workers, and with a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head — won’t understand why the film deserves the star rating I’ve given it. They might even assume that it is great (and it is pretty great) by the same metric that “ The Quiet Girl ” is great.

That would be a mistake. Apples, as they say, must be not be compared to oranges, and certainly not blood oranges, which is perhaps the better analogy for this tart, tangy and juicily sanguineous offering. But fans of the films will understand. They will even accept — nay, demand — the repetition of the series’s formulaic plots, which involve both flight and pursuit.

Triggered by the killing of the titular professional hit man’s dog and the theft of his car, the first “ John Wick ” was essentially a revenge thriller centering on John, or Mr. Wick as he is just as commonly known, and a Russian crime lord (Michael Nyqvist). John’s pursuit of Viggo Tarasov is slightly counterbalanced by the antihero’s efforts to avoid being killed.

Over time, the mix of fight and flight has shifted, with John fully becoming the quarry by the end of “ John Wick: Chapter 2 ,” in the wake of his killing of a Neapolitan Mafioso (Riccardo Scamarcio). As “ John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum ” gets underway, John is being hounded by a lethal Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon), along with nearly every hired gun in the world, having been declared “excommunicado,” or excommunicated, for the murder of Santino D’Antonio on the “sanctified” grounds of a New York City hotel catering exclusively to killers. (Come to think of it, the society to which John belongs — and under whose arcane rules he operates — is more like a religion than a company.)

The point is, these plots are all the same, or at least very similar: John wants someone dead, and someone — or a lot of someones — wants him dead in return. In “Chapter 4,” the main someone is the effete Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), the French representative to the High Table, the governing body of the international crime syndicate for which John works. At nearly three hours long, it’s the most John Wick-ian of all the John Wick films, by virtue of the simple fact that there is more time to lavish on the films’ fans exactly what they want, in spectacular fashion.

And boy, is it spectacular. Would that all action films were so well and cleanly choreographed. (Are you listening, Marvel and DC?) To be sure, the Wick films are not for everyone. But returning director Chad Stahelski, a former stuntman and stunt coordinator, knows one thing: If you’re going to do something, do it right.

Stahelski ups the ante from the previous three films with one amazing set piece after another — a chase scene set in the desert, on horseback; a bloodbath in a discothèque decorated with waterfalls; visits to Osaka and Berlin — each sequence outdoing the one before. The most talked-about fight scenes will surely be two staged in Paris: the first taking place in the traffic roundabout encircling the Arc de Triomphe, known as the Étoile, or star, for its 12 radiating avenues; the second taking place on the 222 steps of the Rue Foyatier leading up to the Sacré-Coeur cathedral, where a climactic duel takes place at dawn between John and the Marquis.

Also in attendance: two secondary antagonists, a killer known only as the Tracker (Shamier Anderson) and a blind assassin named Caine, beautifully brought to life by Chinese martial arts legend Donnie Yen. ( According to Yen , the actor requested a change to the character’s stereotypically Asian name — originally “Shang or Chang,” he says, in the screenplay by Michael Finch, Shay Hatten and Derek Kolstad. Intentionally or not, his character now suggests an homage to David Carradine’s Kwai Chang Caine from the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu.”)

Clearly, Stahelski is a fan of martial arts lore and its elaborate — one might even say perverse — codes of chivalry, ethics and honor among rogues. (The call letters of a radio station in the film are, notably, WUXIA .) He is not alone. If you are also an acolyte in the church of chopsocky, samurai swordplay and gunslinging gangsters, you could do a lot worse than “John Wick: Chapter 4.” In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to do better.

Why not four stars? Because I want to save room for improvement, in case there’s a “Chapter 5.”

R. At area theaters. Contains pervasive strong violence and some coarse language. 169 minutes.

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The Limits and Wonders of John Wick’s Last Fight

John Wick: Chapter 4 , like entries in the franchise before it, treats the body with the elasticity and deranged joy of a Looney Tunes cartoon. Consider Homeless Hare, a 1950 Chuck Jones short in which Bugs Bunny resorts to gleeful violence against a construction worker, Hercules, who uproots the trickster’s home. Bugs begins by dropping a brick from the height of the building on the head of his foe. Attached is a single slip of paper warning Hercules that Bugs is coming for that ass. What follows in this delightful short is defined by wild, violent revenge. So is the John Wick franchise’s approach, and it reflects a similarly potent understanding of the body’s seductive vulnerabilities.

In Chapter 4, Keanu Reeves endures so many violent falls that would kill anyone else, but he always gets up and continues to fight another day — the humor of this inevitability hitting at the same moment as the fear of what could actually end him. This action is crucial to character building and styled specifically for each — though almost everyone in the world is balletic, smooth, and endlessly cool in the face of guns, knives, swords, and all other weaponry on the table. Even the lighting understands this specific fiction, punctuating darkness with cartoonish pops of neon. This approach to action has been broadly adopted in Hollywood, but those that seek to replicate its charms often fail with a lack of clarity, a use of darkness through which the audience can’t see a damn thing. They forget how badly we want to watch — and really see — a star with the heft of Reeves commit these acts of glorious violence.

Chapter 4 is blissfully entertaining, full of pratfalls and acting turns that lead to the audience swelling with oohs, aahs , and yelps. It’s far more narratively focused than its previous sequels, still managing to globe-trot a behemoth cast à la Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 while returning to a simpler conflict reminiscent of the original John Wick. Here, John Wick seeks to finally buy his freedom by dueling the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), a crime-world fixture of inherited power who has been emboldened to bend and break the rules by the High Table in an effort to maintain its supremacy in the face of Wick’s flagrant disruption. Why make the Marquis the target of Wick’s vengeance and freedom instead of letting him take that heat directly to the High Table? The franchise needs to keep the status quo intact for the plentiful spinoffs that filmmakers have in mind — including Ballerina , starring Ana de Armas. I have some reservations about these narrative choices, but the cinematic violence of Chapter 4 brought me the joy and erotic rush that has long powered the series. It synthesizes the zaniness of Looney Tunes and gags of Buster Keaton with martial-arts master classes that call back to the career of Jackie Chan and learn from more recent films like 2017’s South Korean action flick The Villainess . It’s a history lesson on what the body can do onscreen — its limits and its wonders.

Director Chad Stahelski and cinematographer Dan Laustsen create arguably the best-looking of the John Wick films. The quiet moments are evocative — like when Laurence Fishburne’s Bowery King blows out a match before the camera cuts to a cresting sunset (a cheeky homage to Lawrence of Arabia and one of the most famous cuts in film history ) — and the unleashing of violence is clear and easy to follow. There’s no confusion when it comes to how and where characters are inhabiting space. The stellar production design deserves credit as well, particularly in the way the Osaka Continental (run by Hiroyuki Sanada’s Shimazu Koji and his concierge and daughter, Akira, played by Rina Sawayama) is dressed and designed. Its clean lines, glossy surfaces, glass-encased weapons and artifacts, and all-around cool tones diligently build out this world defined by the intertwining of beauty and blood. I was struck by the use of so many shades of red against this backdrop — magenta, crimson, cherry. One of the most tantalizing shots positions Reeves in the left corner, the field of vision otherwise dominated by cherry blossoms in full bloom and a circular building sliced with lights of arterial red. Stahelski and Laustsen make profound use of horizontal space even when one of its best blunders, played out by Reeves on the 222 steps of Paris’s Sacré Coeur basilica, is obviously vertically defined.

And it’s not just Reeves but the many actors in his orbit who shine with a blend of vengeful grace and humorous beats. Bodies everywhere are cut, shot through, flipped, broken, and strangely beautiful when meeting their ends. Although not every end feels quite earned. The late Lance Reddick becomes a sacrificial lamb early on in this chapter, and his story line is shuffled away too quickly. Fishburne’s Shakespearean Bowery King and Clancy Brown’s Harbinger are not used to the full degree that they should be either, but anytime their booming voices are used, the film shines brighter. Until Scott Adkins walks in wearing a grotesque fat suit as Killa. Hollywood’s doubling down on anti-fatness with Colin Farrell’s turn in The Batman and Brendan Fraser’s Oscar-winning performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale will not age well, and it’s frustrating that John Wick ’s final installment has something as loathsome as this. But Chapter 4 offers greater turns by beloved actors and martial artists new and seasoned alike. Donnie Yen plays Caine, a close friend of Wick’s who is pulled back into the life of an assassin to kill his comrade. He has already given up his eyesight in order to protect his daughter and get out, but here, he is forced to endure. He’s delightfully cheeky in his fight scenes, moving with quick-witted, silken force, making Wick’s brutality all the more blatant.

Yen is the film’s MVP — whether he’s slurping down food and ignoring the violence blooming around him or shit-talking the Marquis to his face. Then there’s Sanada’s beautifully rendered Shimazu, dear and determined, who puts his life on the line out of love for Wick and a belief in honor. The friendship between these three men is crucial to the emotional world of the film and gives it layers I wasn’t expecting but wanted more of. When Wick speaks Japanese to Shimazu or shares a long gaze with Caine, these relationships are given an intimacy that relies on Reeves’s own three-decade-long history as a star undergirded by considerations of race, identity, and history. But I was especially surprised by just how damn good pop star Sawayama is in her role. She’s giving looks, poses, the right angles, charisma, grit. She’s so eye-catching that I got lost in the beauty of her performance whenever she was onscreen.

So what about Skarsgård? In many ways, the Marquis and Wick are a study in opposites. Where Wick is stoic and terse, the Marquis is the kind of man who says lines like “Second chances are the refuge of men who fail.” He likes his espresso sweet, his waistcoats fabulous, and his violence flowing endlessly. While Wick earned his reputation, the Marquis was bequeathed his. Wick believes in formality, and the Marquis flouts the rules. Costuming is a strength of the series, which is apparent in this chapter’s fine suits, particularly the Marquis’s — of crimson, of navy, of twilight. Skarsgård leans into the camp and archness roiling under the surface of this franchise. His accent is mellifluous. It dips, flutters, and stretches in ways that feel both studied and hilarious. His face scrunches and has a flexibility that borders on comical while never losing sight of the necessary tone.

Yet by the end, I held a nagging belief that Stahelski and the Chapter 4 script didn’t quite capitalize on all of Reeves’s strengths. This Wick is exceedingly, almost frustratingly, terse and stoic, muttering one-liners and yeah s that could easily trip into the parodic. Reeves is good and game. But the story doesn’t capitulate with earnestness or heartfelt dialogue, choosing to highlight his physical grace and determination above all else. Reeves has always been a performer defined not just by the delicate beauty of his body but an emotional clarity and sweetness that is almost nowhere to be found in this film. Moments with Yen, including a candlelit church scene, are where Chapter 4 comes closest to Reeves’s complexity as an actor who lies at the nexus of virility and vulnerability. Wick’s interactions with a tracker who likes to call himself Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson) allows Reeves to, at least, add notes of befuddlement and curiosity. Mr. Nobody is an obsessive fan of Wick’s — following him and drawing him in a firmly kept notebook while hunting him as the price over Wick’s head accelerates. Mr. Nobody even has a beloved dog he uses in his action sequences. It’s a meta nod to the obsession around Reeves himself and those who seek to duplicate his elegance while not understanding its roots.

What ends up most intriguing about his performance is the subtext of the movie’s denouement: the idea that Reeves is, for however long, ceding the John Wick spotlight — unlike his aging-star cohort (think Brad Pitt in Bullet Train and Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick ), who welcome neophytes into their fold but insist on outlasting them. Reeves is a star who doesn’t suck up all of the oxygen. He’s able to mold himself to the work and pull back when necessary — but maybe too far back this time, as his performance tips into laconic and guarded by the close. (Reeves missed his calling as a silent-film actor, but his best characters aren’t muted.) The Chapter 4 ending, an echo of a crucial one in the beloved ’90s anime Cowboy Bebop, feels like it’s fighting the gravitational force of Reeves rather than submitting to it. Shouldn’t Wick be coming at the High Table, not a proxy? Shouldn’t Wick’s last fight reflect the grandness and dynamism of its focal point? Chapter 4 is a deliriously entertaining entry into the franchise, but its final moments can’t help but put into harsh relief the fact that this ridiculous world of glory and gut punches is evolving to exist without its namesake, yet it still needs him to feel alive.

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John wick: chapter 4, common sense media reviewers.

Extreme, over-the-top violence in Reeves' action epic.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Even among assassins, a code of honor exists. Rule

John Wick is a deadly killer, but he struggles wit

Central character John Wick is played by Keanu Ree

Extremely graphic, intense action violence. Many,

Sporadic use of "f--k," "motherf----r," "s--t," "m

Tie-in merchandise available (toys, blankets, clot

Adult characters drink various alcoholic beverages

Parents need to know that John Wick: Chapter 4 is the fourth film in Keanu Reeves' popular action series. It's also the longest (nearly three hours!), but the filmmakers use the extended running time to create a truly spectacular, dazzlingly visual epic -- though, of course, its themes still revolve mainly…

Positive Messages

Even among assassins, a code of honor exists. Rules are rules, and a promise is a promise. There's strong evidence that violence begets violence, and that once the circle has begun, it's nearly impossible to break out of it, no matter how badly you might want to.

Positive Role Models

John Wick is a deadly killer, but he struggles with the line of work he finds himself stuck in and would really like nothing more than some peace. He kills, but "only" those who intend to hurt others. He breaks the rules, but it's in order to protect those he considers friends.

Diverse Representations

Central character John Wick is played by Keanu Reeves, who's of English, Native Hawaiian, Chinese, and Portuguese descent. Wick's friend Winston (Ian McShane) and the villain, the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), are White men, but most of other characters are women and/or people of color (though, in general, this is a male-dominated story). The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), the Tracker (Shamier Anderson), and Charon (Lance Reddick), the concierge of the Continental Hotel, are all Black. Hiroyuki Sanada (who plays Shimazu, the manager of the Osaka Continental) and Rina Sawayama (his daughter Akira) are both from Japan, Donnie Yen (the sighted actor who plays blind swordsman Caine) is from China, and Natalia Tena (Katia, who adopts John Wick into her family) is of Spanish descent.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Extremely graphic, intense action violence. Many, many characters die. Lots of guns and shooting, with bullet wounds, blood sprays, martial arts fighting, punching, kicking, bloody wounds, brutal injuries, etc. Bows and arrows and swords. Neck-slicing. Hand stabbed and pinned to wooden block, character pulls hand loose, tearing own flesh (squishing sounds heard). Multiple stabbings. Pickax to head. Ax-throwing. Characters shot with gun that causes them to burst into flame. Blood spatters. Oozing blood. Multiple car crashes, pedestrians smashing into moving cars. Dog smashed into car windshield (he's OK). A building explodes. Characters thrown through glass windows. Characters falling from great heights, bashing against obstacles on the way down. Character bashed into metal pole. Characters branding flesh. Dog ordered to attack (both "nuts!" and "kill!"). Character hanging by neck from rope, choking. Character falling down multiple stairs.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sporadic use of "f--k," "motherf----r," "s--t," "merde," "a--hole," "ass," "bastard," "hell," "damn," "nuts."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Tie-in merchandise available (toys, blankets, clothing, etc.).

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adult characters drink various alcoholic beverages in social settings.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that John Wick: Chapter 4 is the fourth film in Keanu Reeves ' popular action series. It's also the longest (nearly three hours!), but the filmmakers use the extended running time to create a truly spectacular, dazzlingly visual epic -- though, of course, its themes still revolve mainly around violence and revenge. And it's extremely, outrageously violent. Expect guns and shooting, a high body count, bloody wounds, blood spurts and sprays, fighting, kicking, punching, throat-slitting, stabbing, bows and arrows, swords, falls from high places, car chases and crashes, characters getting hit by cars or slammed into cars (or other hard objects), an attack dog, and much more. Language includes a smattering of words like "f--k," "motherf----r," "s--t," "a--hole," "ass," "bastard," "hell," and "damn" and the French swear word "merde." Adult characters drink in social settings. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (8)
• Kids say (22)

Based on 8 parent reviews

This astounding, non-stop action joyride has constant violence

Hyper violent entertaining film with lots of action and high body count, what's the story.

In JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4, John Wick ( Keanu Reeves ) is cut off from the Continental, and everyone who ever tried to help him is in trouble with a powerful member of the High Table who's known as the Marquis ( Bill Skarsgård ). The Marquis starts by shutting down the Continental Hotel in New York. Wick is lying low at a sister hotel in Osaka, Japan, thanks to his friend, hotel manager Shimazu Koji ( Hiroyuki Sanada ). Unfortunately, the Marquis knows Wick is there and sends an army to dispatch him, including another of Wick's old friends, blind swordsman Caine ( Donnie Yen ). Wick escapes and vows revenge against the Marquis, but, according to the rules, Wick must challenge him to a duel. Unfortunately, even that much isn't going to be easy.

Is It Any Good?

Clocking in at a hefty 169 minutes, the fourth Wick movie spreads its wings and goes full-blown epic. Every single shot is a dazzler, it has a surefooted pace, and the simple story is elevated to mythical status. The original John Wick was stripped to the bone, clean and classic at just 101 minutes, but by the time John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum came along, the franchise had become flabby -- and exhausting.

But if this franchise as a whole has been inspired by Sergio Leone, then John Wick: Chapter 4 is akin to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly . The cinematography is consistently luxurious, calling to mind the indelible images of movies like Kill Bill , Skyfall , and Blade Runner 2049 . And if that wasn't enough, director Chad Stahelski reaches high and pays homage to Lawrence of Arabia , Taxi Driver , and The Warriors , too. His pacing is supremely confident: He knows when to rest, when to pour on the clear, vivid action, and when to ramp it up another impossible notch. Ultimately, John Wick: Chapter 4 still isn't really about much more than violence and revenge, but this time Wick and his various layers of ambiguous friends/enemies (including the amazing Yen and a very good Shamier Anderson as the Tracker) find themselves wriggling between the concept of ending violence and the worrisome notion that this may not be possible.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about John Wick: Chapter 4 's violence . How did it make you feel? Shocked? Thrilled? Do you think all of it is necessary to the story? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

Is John Wick a hero or a villain? How can you tell? Is it OK to sympathize with characters who do illegal or wrong things?

John is strongly motivated by revenge. Is that understandable? Is revenge ever an acceptable excuse for violence?

How important are rules in this story? Are rules made to be broken? What about rules in your home or school?

How does this sequel compare with the other entries?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 24, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : May 23, 2023
• Cast : Keanu Reeves , Donnie Yen , Bill Skarsgård
• Director : Chad Stahelski
• Inclusion Information : Asian actors, Polynesian/Pacific Islander actors
• Studio : Lionsgate
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Run time : 169 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : pervasive strong violence and some language
• Last updated : October 21, 2023

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“John Wick: Chapter 4,” Reviewed: A Slog with a Sensational Ending

By Richard Brody

“John Wick: Chapter 4” is by far the best of the four films starring Keanu Reeves as the eponymous hit man, the first of the cycle that I’d recommend—albeit with an asterisk. The new film (which opens Friday) has many of the same problems as its predecessors; although these problems are interesting, they’re far more fun to contemplate in the rearview mirror of thought than in the real-time forward motion of viewing. But something happens, fairly late in the game, that converts the film’s merely technical displays of bloody murder into something suspenseful and romantic, if no less silly. The details are too good to give away, but there’s no harm and much pleasure in considering how the movie climbs, slowly but surely, to that light-headed summit.

One of the curiosities of the John Wick series is that, as an entirely original creation dependent on no prior properties, it has nonetheless given rise to an alluring and self-perpetuating mythology of its own. The premise of Wickworld is cleverly paranoiac, built around the tentacular connections between the crude underworld of contract killers and the shadowy overlords who keep them in action. That wicked authority is called the High Table; it dispenses orders to kill on pain of being killed, ratifies contracts for murder, and brokers the deals for bounty hunters. It commands John to kill, and it sets him up to be killed, but it also sets the tone of the movie. The High Table exemplifies a super-élite of secret societies with elaborate rites, deeply rooted aristocracies, a flaunting of mind-bending wealth, and the executive ruthlessness of a transnational shadow government that has the power to wreak havoc in public with impunity.

It also has the power of information—an enormous database on its registered killers (it apparently goes back centuries) and a terrifyingly comprehensive surveillance network that tracks the hunters and the hunted during their mortal maneuvers and discloses their whereabouts to devastating effect. Its agents hide in plain sight at, for instance, a hotel called the New York Continental, in Manhattan’s financial district. ( Delmonico’s plays the role of the hotel.) Its stern manager, Winston (Ian McShane), is John’s handler, and is aided by his discerning and tight-lipped concierge (played by Lance Reddick, who died on March 17th). Another High Table agent on John’s team, the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), disguises his crew of spies as unhoused people in a shelter that he runs.

The High Table itself reveals its enduring traditions in the anachronistic equipment and furnishings of its central intelligence office (complete with card files, blackboards, rubber stamps, and switchboards). The venerable sect of hired killers can trace its lineage to a few authorized families, an aristocracy of blood (pun intended) that pulls the death dealers out of the grubby streets and endows their gruesome trade with a faux dignity. Their rigorous code of conduct dominates the movie’s, and the franchise’s, over-all tone and import: the intricate set of seemingly nonsensical rules plays the role of military discipline and order, but it also signifies, with a politicized wink at the rites and manners of high society, the implacable law of violence, which pretensions to refinement both embody and conceal.

“Chapter 4” takes off from the third installment , which concluded with John killing a High Table assassin at the New York Continental, with Winston’s help, and then teaming up with the Bowery King to fight against the High Table. At the start of “Chapter 4,” the King gets John suited up for battle, and the High Table takes devastating revenge against Winston for helping John—for starters, Winston is excommunicated, and the hotel is demolished. John heads to Morocco (the actual location is in Jordan) to dispatch a High Table overlord called the Elder (George Georgiou) and his minions, then goes to Osaka—to the Osaka Continental hotel, another High Table base—where he learns from its manager (Hiroyuki Sanada), who is his friend, what happened to Winston and the New York hotel. John vows to “kill them all.”

But the manager’s daughter, Akira (Rina Sawayama), who is also John’s friend, wishes he hadn’t come. There’s a contract on John for having killed High Table notables, and Akira is well aware that any place he sets foot is a target, including her father’s hotel. The assassins pursuing him there include a bounty hunter called Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson), who shows up with his beloved dog (a cheeky reference back to the premise of the first John Wick movie), and a nasty nebbish called Chidi (Marko Zaror). There’s also a remarkable blind assassin named Caine (Donnie Yen), who has been dispatched by a High Table potentate called the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård), an effete and sadistic nobleman who has laid waste to the New York hotel and threatened to kill Caine’s daughter unless Caine kills John.

Yet John, for all his seething lust for revenge, is burdened—he is (to quote Charlie Chaplin’s parody of Hollywood violence in “ A King in New York ”) a killer with a soul. The very premise of “Chapter 4” evinces sequel fatigue. John Wick wants out. Reeves may well enjoy the role, but he convincingly portrays John’s weariness bordering on exasperation at the absurdity of living under the orders—and in the crosshairs—of the implacable High Table. Even though he shoots and stabs and even nunchucks his way out of the Osaka Continental, leaving a trail of bodies and blood behind, he can’t kill his way out of his indenture to the High Table or its pursuit of him.

What happens in Osaka doesn’t stay in Osaka, and neither does John. He flits to New York, where Winston advises him to duel the Marquis for his freedom, and then to Berlin, where, in a series of set pieces ranging from the sententious to the ridiculous, he has to do some more killing in order to be deemed duel-worthy. What results is a grisly form of multidimensional chess, in which John’s enemies also target one another in order to keep for themselves the privilege of killing John, and in which John allies himself, according to the demands of the moment, with one or another of his prospective killers.

Much of the movie’s delight is in its details, many of them gory (a little trick with a knife that the Marquis pulls on Mr. Nobody), others merely menacing (John’s surprise encounter on an eerily empty subway car), some location-dependent (a brutalist night club with a waterlogged dance floor), and some design-based (including a deck of cards made of glass, and a picturesque molten-gold method for branding flesh). Some of these flourishes nod toward the breezy suaveness in the face of danger that marks the best of the early 007 films. Here, though, the stakes are lowered beneath the absurdity line by the relentless mayhem, which is at once cartoonish and mostly humorless. That’s why, as Caine, Donnie Yen nearly steals the film. His humor is as sly as it is insolent (as when he eats a snack between killings), and his comedic gestures are as tiny and deft as his action maneuvers, which are so fast as to border on sleight of hand.

The comic relief is welcome, but it’s never so extreme or so self-aware as to threaten the grim earnestness and grotesque exaggerations of the violence. (With a little more self-awareness, the movie would have a place in the body-horror genre.) A recent report places John’s estimated body count throughout the series at four hundred and fifty. I’m not sure how many of them pile up in “Chapter 4,” but, assuming a rough average of a hundred and twelve, the killings are (as in the first three chapters) classist and trivializing. Only a few of John’s opponents have names, identities, and personalities; most are woefully anonymous, dispatched into oblivion by John with neither a name nor a story, with nothing but the misfortune to square off against him. They are mere fodder for John’s deathcraft, their heads vaporizing in pink mist inside their battle helmets, their bodies catching fire from his incendiary weaponry, their blood spurting fountain-like from slash wounds.

The director, Chad Stahelski, works these elaborate fights and their flimsy killings with flashy but insignificant embellishments (such as filming an indoor battle royal from overhead, as if by drone). He displays little imagination regarding the characters’ activity, or even existence, outside the realm of combat. The many unnamed victims’ mechanical dispatch is a logical function of the franchise’s basic premise: that John (like his co-starring killers) is a member of a breed apart, dealing and eluding death with aplomb but never enduring the petty cares that go with the job. Does John Wick have a passport? He may be superheroic with firearms, fists, and whatever other weapons are within arm’s reach, but he doesn’t fly like Superman. Does he go first class or economy? What does he say when he reaches passport control and is asked, “Business or pleasure?” Does he have an array of forged documents, under a variety of pseudonyms and nationalities, that he switches around to fit his sense of the circumstances? With all the killing that he’s done, has he never come under suspicion? Does he ever worry about it? His exploits may be extraordinary, but they’re nonetheless dependent upon ordinary, unseen necessities. (If, as he leaves Osaka for New York, he’s as filled with regrets as he’d have one believe, spending sixteen hours sandwiched in a middle seat between two snorers would be an apt setting to ponder where he went wrong.) Does he listen to music, does he read a book, does he have a favorite food?

Most of “Chapter 4” is an amusingly punctuated slog. It’s distinguished from its predecessors by the starkly drawn yet complex lines of conflict. The promised duel, ingeniously plotted and cleverly staged, depends on a droll race against the clock—one that gives new meaning to the notion of fighting one’s way through traffic—and a long staircase that becomes a virtual agent of destiny. In short, the last half hour or so of the movie’s nearly three-hour span is giddily intense, swoony, swashbuckling, and sensational yet superficial fun. Right after I saw the movie, I couldn’t stop talking about that ending. It makes the rest of the movie worth sitting through. ♦

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John Wick: Chapter 4 Review

23 Mar 2023

John Wick: Chapter 4

John Wick: Chapter 4  is relentlessly violent. It just does not stop. It bludgeons you like the endless array of assassins bludgeoning its hero. It is so incessantly, expensively savage, it may well be the end of civilisation. Weaponry this time around includes the following: swords, guns (sometimes both together), fists, feet, elbows, nunchucks, knives, dogs, bows and arrows, pickaxes, cars, motorbikes, a pencil. Notoriously, 80-something people were killed in the first instalment. In this one it seems 80-something people are killed in each set-piece. It is insane. This is mania.

The third film ended with John ( Keanu Reeves ) left for dead and out for blood. It felt like the franchise had been milked dry, but Reeves and director Chad Stahelski can’t help themselves, and here they are again, taking that cliffhanger and running with it, barely stopping for breath. This is the first  Wick  that doesn’t have the involvement of series creator and writer Derek Kolstad , and story takes a back seat. You thought the plots were, well, modest before? Haha. Here, plot is an obligation, existing to string together the fighting. And anything goes. A shootout in the desert, on camels? Sure.

Yes, it’s a love letter to action cinema, but so much so that action cinema might want to take out a restraining order.

Chapter 4  is especially episodic, jumping from one country to another, conjuring up different friends and foes each time. There’s Donnie Yen , nearly 60 but looking 40 and fighting like 20, his blind hitman Caine a graceful murderer. Reeves’  47 Ronin  co-star Hiroyuki Sanada brings samurai chops as Wick ally Shimazu, whose lethal daughter Akira is played by a formidable Rina Sawayama. A very entertaining Scott Adkins , in a fat suit and an accent as German High Table boss Killa – yes, Killa – shows up for a riotous sequence in a packed nightclub where not a single raver pays the blind bit of notice to these two lunatics attempting to kill each other among them. And so on.

Throughout, the action is gobsmacking, with inventive set-pieces including an aerial view of a brawl smashing through a succession of rooms, and a breathtaking fight among speeding cars around the Arc de Triomphe in which you spend every second wondering how the hell they’re pulling it off.

And yet… well, it’s all a bit much. Yes, it’s a love letter to action cinema, but so much so that action cinema might want to take out a restraining order. Assassins keep appearing, from every angle, infinitely, like re-spawning videogame characters. Some of the fighting goes on and on and on until you’re begging for someone to win so we can all get to the next bit – the slugfest is, at its worst, a slog. And it is of course as portentous as ever. The High Table, an amorphous, abstract concept anyway, is even slipperier here, while Laurence Fishburne and Ian McShane have less to do than before, facsimiles of what were thin archetypes in the first place.

Things happen that you really should care about, but you don’t. Not much. Although oddly, considering the stakes, the film seems maybe disinterested in having an emotional impact. Unless wincing is an emotion. Reeves basically operates with one register (mythologically gruff). But then again, that’s what this series is, and even with that narrow remit, Reeves is ceaselessly charismatic. With  Point Break  and  Speed  he reinvented the action hero, and it’s pretty great that he’s still going this hard three decades on.

Besides, if you’re going to watch this, the action’s what you want, and as far as that goes, you just can’t knock it. It is incredibly tactile – it  hurts . You can see that Reeves really is doing a huge amount of it himself, and it counts. You feel it. He’s treated like a rag doll in this one, towards the end bringing to mind Buster Keaton – the extremity is funny, intentionally so. He gets knocked down, but he gets up again. And again, and again, and again. Pray for his bones.

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‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ Review: The Wickiverse at Its Most Ambitious, Goofy, and Thrilling

Keanu Reeves and director Chad Stahelski have outdone themselves with this fourth installment.

John Wick: Chapter 4 begins with a punch so hard and so loud, it jolts you upright in your seat. After that punch, we get another, and another, and another. Even though we expect every subsequent punch, the impact never lessens, as John Wick aka Baba Yaga ( Keanu Reeves ) prepares for yet another fight. The same is true of the John Wick franchise, a series that began almost a decade ago with a mid-budget action film that became a hit thanks to some of the most intense and insane fights in modern cinema, and has continually upped the stakes and scale with each new release.

But even though John Wick has been a reliable source of some of the best action scenes in the 21st century, there’s only so far this franchise can go without showing its seams or going to even more absurd lengths that undercut it. Even with 2019’s John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum , it often felt like some of the same concepts were being reused, just with new weaponry and different colored neon lights illuminating the fights. But with John Wick: Chapter 4 , series director Chad Stahelski and 4 ’s writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch do give us an opening half that feels like a sort-of greatest hits of elements we’ve seen before—but with enough added blood (literal and figurative)—and a second half that feels wholly original, with some of the best, most exciting work this franchise has given us so far.

Chapter 4 keeps the plot to a minimum, as John Wick is continuing his fight against The High Table, attempting to get out from under their thumb. In the opening moments, Wick heads to Morocco and kills the Elder, which sets off an even stronger hunt for Wick, led by Marquis Vincent de Gramont ( Bill Skarsgård ), a high-ranking member of The High Table. Wick once again sets on a mission to kill his way to his freedom, taking him around the world, meeting old friends and new enemies.

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For the first half of Chapter 4 , it’s understandable to feel a bit uneasy about how this story is being handled, especially with that three-hour runtime looming in the back of your head. Some of the fights occasionally feel reminiscent of those from previous films, while this first half also spends plenty of time setting the table for The High Table. But despite, that, Stahelski knows how to reinvigorate these fight sequences in new ways. For example, a fight early on in Osaka reminds of several other fights set among large panes of glass in a mostly empty floor of a building. And yet, this only comes to mind in passing, as there are enough new pieces to make this all work, such as new characters like the blind assassin Caine ( Donnie Yen ), who has been tasked by the High Table to take out Wick, as well as Shimazu Koji ( Hiroyuki Sanada ), the manager of the Osaka Continental Hotel, and his kickass daughter/concierge Akira ( Rina Sawayama )—who might just be the best addition to this series yet. Also, this scene gives John Wick nunchucks, and that is more than enough.

Another scene later on is a bit more questionable, centering around Killa, the head of Germany’s Table. Played by Scott Adkins , Killa is in a fat suit for no particular reason, other than to make him someone to laugh at as he holds his own against Wick. This fight also takes place in a nightclub, which certainly reminds of the first John Wick , but it just doesn’t leave the same impact as the other fights in the film.

But this sort of revisiting set pieces of the past feels intentional, not just as a sign of fan service, but almost as a celebration of this series after nearly a decade. These sequences might not feel familiar to those who only saw these films once in theaters, but for those who love this series, the nods to the other films in this series feel purposeful. That’s because by and large, John Wick: Chapter 4 feels at least like this series saying goodbye to this piece of the Wick -iverse, and decide to do so in style.

This is especially true in the film’s back half, which is quite literally the most insane fight scenes in the entire franchise put back-to-back-to-back. It’s not hyperbole to say John Wick: Chapter 4 ends with some of the most impressive sequences Wick has ever seen, but some of the best action scenes in recent memory. Narratively, Chapter 4 isn’t reinventing the wheel from what we’ve seen before, yet Stahelski knows how to up the ante in shocking fashion. If Parabellum added knives and dogs to the equation, Chapter 4 adds car crashes, overhead angles, and some of the most absurd ways for Wick to get hurt and yet still survive. Wick is like a live-action Wile E. Coyote.

Stahelski relishes the video game logic and style for this film, as Wick’s mission sets him on side quests with different achievements to meet, mini-bosses, and even fights that feel straight from a game. For example, the aforementioned club fight almost feels like Wick and Killa could be fighting in a Street Fighter level, as dancers continue their partying, despite people dancing all around them, and one scene set at the Arc de Triomphe feels similarly gamey, but in a good way. Even one segment near the end is as if Stahelski put Wick in Smash TV or Hotline Miami .

Chapter 4 also does the best job so far in this series of building out this world in ways that don’t overcomplicate or overtake the narrative at hand. The High Table is kept deliberately vague—as it probably should be, as it only adds intrigue to this mysterious group—while it’s still a joy to see Wick’s usual companions like Ian McShane ’s Winston and Laurence Fishburne ’s Bowery King. But adding to the fleshing out of this world are these new characters that feel as though they’ve belonged this entire time. Rina Sawayama, in particular, is a fantastic addition, and watching her fight alongside Wick almost makes you wish the series could follow her as well. Skarsgård is also a perfect villain for this story, more interested in rules and planning than actual fighting, and Yen adds a great amount of comedy and stakes to a story that can often get bogged down in the constant fighting. Additionally, Shamier Anderson ’s Mr. Nobody also adds plenty of mystery and intrigue to this story, while his reliance on his dog reminds of Halle Berry ’s Sofia Al-Azwar from Parabellum .

But, of course, Reeves is still brilliant in this role, and it’s largely thanks to him that this franchise has remained one of the best action series maybe ever. Reeves can not only provide beat downs in pretty much every way imaginable, but his fighting is often extremely funny in its execution, and even though Wick is a man of few words, Hatten and Finch’s script makes the most of them, reminding us why Wick started this fight in the first place. Reeves is the glue that makes this entire arc work, and this is the best he’s been in this series.

John Wick: Chapter 4 is a goofy, ridiculous, three-hours of fun that manages to not overstay its welcome. Stahelski continues to find ways to keep this series from getting stale, and Chapter 4 pushes the ambition to the brink. John Wick: Chapter 4 brings this part of the story to a close with some of the most unhinged action scenes ever put on screen, but shows that there’s still so much to do within this world. Yeah, I’m thinking John Wick is back, and better than ever.

John Wick: Chapter 4 comes to theaters on March 24.

‘John Wick: Chapter 4’: Keanu Reeves Saves Action Movies Again

By David Fear

Fess up: You had no idea John Wick would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Not an inkling. Not a hint. Not even a teeny, tiny clue.

No one could have predicted that a movie burdened with a title taken from the name of its lead character — who is John Wick? Why should we even care? — and that starred an actor who’d been off the public’s radar for a bit, would synthesize a decade’s worth of genre cinema and revolutionize American action movies . Keanu Reeves still looked fit, still wore those slim black suits like a boss, still utilized his signature monotone to suggest stoner-like awe and/or menace. But here was the ‘90s posterboy edging into his 50s, playing a hit man who gets dragged back into the life one last time, forced to use his particular set of skills in the name of revenge. The inciting factor: Bad guys killed his puppy.

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The fourth time is rarely if ever a charm, and given the way that each movie has successively upped the ante, John Wick: Chapter 4 — the latest and likely last entry — has to bear the burden of serious expectations. Logic dictates a new adventure must be bigger, faster, louder. It has to be beyond Wick -ier. That type of thinking is a trap, and while our impeccably dressed baba yaga falls into his share of ambushes and pitfalls, the filmmakers nimbly avoid the lure of supersizing everything at the expense of artisanal adrenaline rushes and character lore. Yes, the running time is just short of three hours, and there are several set pieces (an extended attack on a Tokyo hotel, a free-for-all in traffic around the Arc de Triomphe) that hold their own against the series’ best bits of meticulously assembled chaos. Should you think Chapter 4 is short on ambition and scope, please note that it liberally lifts one of the single most famous edits in film-epic history in its first 10 minutes.

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The gent responsible for that pistols-at-dawn tête-à-tête is known as the Marquis ( Bill Skarsgård ), a part-time French aristocrat and full-time sadist who has designs on taking control of the High Table, i.e. the secret council that rules over a vast, international underworld. His first move is to send a message by punishing Winston ( Ian McShane ), the New York Continental’s manager, for helping the excommunicado Wick. Never mind that the hotel’s boss shot his friend off the five-star accommodation’s roof at the end of Chapter 3 ; the Marquis is still going to demolish the building, much to Winston and his concierge’s horror. (That latter role is once again played by Lance Reddick , which only adds an extra layer of eulogistic pathos to the proceedings. R.I.P. to a legend .) His next plan is to call in a marker on Caine (martial arts godhead Donnie Yen), a retired blind assassin and old pal of Wick’s, in order to terminate the fugitive with extreme prejudice.

As for Wick, he’s still in the wind and trying to avoid an army of freelance killers looking to collect on that open-contract bounty, notably a nameless tracker (Shamier Anderson) who, like John, is a committed dog lover. He joins an ensemble of allies and enemies that move in and out of Wick’s orbit, including the Bowery King ( Laurence Fishburne ), the Tokyo Continental’s bigwig (Hiroyuki Sanada), his daughter (pop star Rina Sawayama ), the Marquis’ hulking enforcer (Marko Zaror), a criminal matriarch ( Game of Thrones ’ Natalia Tena), a High Table harbringer (Clancy Brown), and corpulent German über -crook (Scott Adkins) who’s got card-shark skills and, surprisingly, serious Taekwondo chops.

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Merely listing an inventory of John Wick: Chapter 4 ’s greatest hits — that phrase can be taken literally in this case — doesn’t do justice to the way that everyone involved with this final chapter maintains the high standard that’s made the franchise so deliriously pleasurable. Or at the very least, pure manna for those of us who like our screen action to feel like they’re putting the “motion” into motion pictures, as if the folks behind the scenes took pride in constructing these thrilling sequences with a sense of professionalism and imagination. Even its conservative streak (has any other action franchise been so obsessed with rules, traditions, bylaws, bloodlines, codes of conduct?) and tough-guy corniness still feels freshly retro-styled and amped up after four outings.

You may be slightly exhausted by the time you get to the boss level, in which an anachronistic way of settling scores man-to-man is turned into something witty, clever, and as exciting as a Destroy-All-Mobsters massacre in a Euro-goth dance club or desert kasbah. A landing is stuck, in other words. That’s no small feat. Nor is delivering a quadrilogy with zero weak links, not getting tripped up in your universe’s mythology or making you completely rethink your notions about what certain movie stars could do. We came into this series tickled by the element of surprise. And we leave Chapter 4 with the distinct feeling of satisfaction. How good it was to see you again, Mr. Wick.

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John Wick: Chapter 4 review – overlong and overstuffed action sequel

Keanu Reeves returns as the indestructible hitman in a follow-up that confuses bigger for better at a patience-stretching almost three-hour runtime

L ate in the fourth film bearing his name, indestructible hitman John Wick (Keanu Reeves) falls down some stairs. Quite a few stairs, actually – tossed by an enemy down the 222 steps of Paris’s famed Rue Foyatier on his way to the final showdown at the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, he tumbles down one flight after another like a Slinky in an immaculately tailored suit. He finally crumples on to a landing, only to get hurled once more down the rest of the stairs, at which point the absurd amount of time spent watching him roll back over the path he just climbed turns into its own deadpan, sisyphean joke.

This bit isn’t quite as funny during the rest of John Wick: Chapter 4’s bloated two hours and 49 minutes, though it’s not really meant to be. To crib a phrase, everything happens so much to our killing-machine hero as he blazes a bloody trail from New York to Osaka to Berlin to Paris. Scene after scene drags on far past the point of redundancy, the zillion solemn ceremonies and over-the-shoulder flips landing in monotony without the saving grace of a winking laugh. An entirely earnest and altogether fatal fondness for itself has drawn out a franchise once prized for its lean-and-mean ferocity into a logy death march set at a dirge’s pace. Roger Ebert memorably declared that no good movie is too long, his point not that fun can go on forever, but that a well-told story takes as long as it takes. Wick’s latest outing indulges in muchness for its own sake, and where unrestrained excess has blown open the gate for mad inspiration in so many others, the director, Chad Stahelski, lacks the showman’s instinct for building and payoff.

In the side-quest-clogged narrative as in the virtuosic fight sequences that far overstay their welcome, a viewer starts to feel the difference between maximalism and merely having a lot of stuff, somewhere around the third hour and mostly in our glutes. Like gun-fu ace Wick, Stahelski’s crew just kept shooting and shooting and shooting, too caught up in the action to stop and consider what it’s all for.

This needless elongation frustrates in particular because the plot at hand fits within a single sentence: hunted by his former assassin guild, Wick must clear his name by defeating the new head honcho Marquis (Bill Skarsgard, whose pouty lips and literal silver spoon in his mouth mark him as an effete, privileged object of hatred) in a duel. Should be simple enough, if not for the world-building arcana this series’ writers have decided its audience can’t get enough of. We’re made to wade through about an hour of movie before an ally notifies J-Dubs that this get-out-of-execution-free card even exists, except that he can’t formally file his challenge with the Marquis until lone wolf Wick pledges his allegiance to one of the guild’s officially recognized cells. And he can’t do that until he snuffs out a rotund local mobster (the great Scott Adkins, nimble even in a Norbit-quality fat suit) to curry their favor. And so on and so on.

To the extent that Wick’s vehicles follow the same schematic as musicals, with shootouts taking the place of song-and-dance numbers, the script doesn’t have to do much more than usher the characters from one showstopper to the next. And each set piece has an amusing gimmick; an army of guys in bulletproof suits must be dispatched with headshots, a blind mercenary (Donnie Yen) picks off foes using doorbell sensors, an aerial shot follows Wick on a shotgun-flamethrower rampage. But the legendary Freed unit behind MGM’s Golden Age extravaganzas understood that you only get one multi-part dream-ballet fantasy suite, and that your grand finale – in this case, a melee in the traffic circle around the Arc de Triomphe that plays like a life-or-death game of Frogger – should come at the end. Just as an actor-turned-director gives his cast the free rein for scenery-gnawing he’s always wanted for himself, former stuntman Stahelski’s evident and often endearing affection for his professional peers gets the better of him in impressive battles nonetheless hampered by two or three extraneous beats.

There was a time when an economical-minded studio head would have forcibly excised the pointless horseback chase in the Middle East, or the wheel-spinning interlude in Germany, or the morally ambiguous Tracker (Shamier Anderson) that screenwriters Shay Hatten and Michael Finch can’t figure out what to do with. For whatever reason – the endless scroll of streaming content reorienting our concept of a long time, perhaps – Hollywood has made its peace with the three-hour blockbuster, and expects the public to do the same. The most faithful faction of the Wick fandom will undoubtedly be pleased to see their belief that you can’t have too much of a good thing put into practice. Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.

John Wick: Chapter 4 will be released in the US, UK and Australia on 24 March

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7 best fight scenes in action movies, ranked

Fight scenes are the backbone of any action movie and come in all different shapes and sizes. Fight scenes can be loud, violent versions of controlled chaos, as evidenced in the John Wick movies. They can be smaller in scale and confined to one space, like the elevator sequence in Drive . Martial artists such as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan proved that the elaborate choreography of hand-to-hand combat can be as graceful and poetic as a dance.

7. The one-take stairwell sequence in Atomic Blonde (2017)

• 6. The Sacré Coeur stair fight in John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

5. The dojo fight in Fist of Fury (1972)

4. neo vs. agent smith in the subway in the matrix (1999), 3. bathhouse knife fight in eastern promises (2007), 2. jen yu vs. yu shu lien in crouching tiger, hidden dragon (2000), 1. rama vs. the assassin in the raid 2 (2014).

Whatever your preference is, fight scenes have a way of wowing the audience through brutal, visceral actions. Stunt teams and choreographers continue to raise the bar on what’s possible in an action movie. To honor these cinematic sequences, Digital Trends ranks the best fight scenes captured in action movies.

David Leitch ( Bullet Train ) knows a thing or two about what it takes to stage a great fight scene. Leitch previously worked on The Matrix trilogy, John Wick , and  Blade , so his résumé speaks for itself. Though he co-directed John Wick  with Chad Stahelski, Leitch’s credited directorial debut is  Atomic Blonde , an action thriller starring Charlize Thereon ( Fast X ) as a female spy tasked with destroying an espionage ring in Germany days before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

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The defining sequence in the film is the one-take fight scene in the stairwell of a Berlin apartment. Leitch told Insider that he decided to shoot it in one take after being impressed by videos from Theron’s training, which gave him the confidence to go through with the scene. It took two weeks to shoot, but the risk paid off as the stunning eight-minute sequence showcased Theron’s abilities as an action star and further cemented Leitch and his stunt team as among the best in Hollywood.

6. The Sacré Coeur stair fight in John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

Since its inception in 2014, the John Wick franchise has produced some of the most exciting fight sequences in action movie history, so much so that this article could easily have been dedicated to seven of the best fight scenes in those four films. That’s how good these sequences have been. Each movie continues to one-up itself as to what’s possible in fight choreography. In John Wick , the Red Circle Club sequence is the standout. In John Wick: Chapter 2 , it’s the Hall of Mirrors. In John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, the knife fight became the lasting memory.

Those scenes were all built toward the stairway sequence in Paris in John Wick: Chapter 4 . In the scene, John ( The Matrix’s Keanu Reeves) must climb 200-plus steps to reach the final duel at Sacré Coeur. John disposes of every assassin in his way, yet when he reaches the top, he’s violently knocked off his feet, causing him to tumble down every stair back to the bottom. But John receives some help when Caine ( Mulan ‘s Donnie Yen), a blind assassin, teams up with John to reclimb the stairs, killing every obstacle in their path and cementing this as the best scene in Chapter 4 .

Bruce Lee ( Enter the Dragon ) only takes up one spot on this list, but if his scenes took up all seven spots, would anyone have any arguments against it? I know I wouldn’t. Lee’s prowess in mixed martial arts was so integral that he’s still referenced as the most influential practitioners of all time despite having tragically passed away 50 years ago. Thanks to him, Enter the Dragon  is easily one of the best martial arts films ever made.

However, I keep coming back to the dojo fight in  Fist of Fury  as his defining fight sequence. In the scene, Lee’s Chen Zhen crashes a Japanese dojo and ends up fighting every single member, all 20-plus of them, including their sensei. Politically, the fight symbolized the angst toward Japanese imperialism. Stylistically, it’s a master class in fight choreography, as Lee takes on two dozen fighters in seven minutes. The scene became a defining moment in shaping Lee’s legacy as a martial arts expert.

The battle between man and machine has become a piece of sacred sci-fi text that belongs in the same sentence as Star Wars and Blade Runner . While the stunts in The Matrix were created in the late ’90s, they remain some of the most intricately filmed and choreographed sequences ever captured. From the use of bullet time to the cyberpunk influence, The Matrix  inspired a new generation of action filmmaking.

The perfect encapsulation of what makes  The Matrix  great is the fight sequence between Neo ( John Wick’s Keanu Reeves ) and Agent Smith ( The Lord of the Rings’ Hugo Weaving). The highly choreographed fight sequence is as intricate as it is stunning. The use of wire fu was a game changer and the perfect ode to Hong Kong martial arts films that came before it. There have been better action films than The Matrix , but few have been more influential.

Fending off two Chechen assassins is hard enough, but imagine trying to do it naked. Unfortunately for Viggo Mortenson ( Captain Fantastic ) and his character Nikolai Luzhin in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises ,  this scenario becomes his reality. In the scene, two tall, bulky Chechen assassins enter a Turkish bathhouse looking to take out Kirill Semyonovich ( Westworld’s Vincent Cassel). However, the assassins are tricked into believing that Nikolai is Kirill, and they attack the Russian mobster in the bathhouse with linoleum cutters.

Nikolai is forced to fend off the assassins with only a towel on, which quickly flies off as he blocks one of the stab attempts. The assassins severely injure Nikolai, as his blood drips across the bathroom tiles, but the Russian survives thanks to his sheer toughness and skill. The bloody fight is so jarring and memorable that Roger Ebert called it a “benchmark” for fights, and said it “sets the same kind of standard that The French Connection set for chases.” 

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon  is a masterful martial arts film that is breathtaking to watch. The choreographed fight sequences play like a ballet, as the physicality and synchronized movements rival a beautiful dance. These sequences can be attributed to Yuen Woo-ping, the legendary martial arts choreographer and champion of Hong Kong cinema.

The scene that stands out in a movie full of intricate battles is the swordfight between Yu Shu Lien ( Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Michelle Yeoh ) and Jen Yu ( Godzilla: King of the Monsters’ Zhang Ziyi). Yu Shu Lien is out to retrieve the sword known as The Green Destiny, which Jen possesses. The two battle in a jaw-dropping swordfigh, incorporating wire fu techniques and precise choreography to create a powerful example of peak action cinematography.

Like the staircase sequence in John Wick: Chapter 4 , The Raid franchise saves its most impressive fight for the end of the last film in the series, The Raid 2 . After surviving a deadly car chase and a battle with siblings Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man, Rama ( The Raid ) faces his toughest challenge yet, a kitchen fight against the Assassin ( Gundala’s Cecep Arif Rahman), a violent killer whose weapon of choice is a Karambit knife.

While many fight scenes in The Raid franchise are chaotic, with a lot of moving parts, the kitchen fight is smaller and more controlled. But the sequence is equally as impressive due to its high-level choreography. The white kitchen is soon stained with wine, broken glass, and blood as the foes fight to the death. The deadly battle is one of the best one-on-one combat scenes of the 21st century, cementing its place as one of the best in cinematic history.

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What's the best John Wick movie? The answer is harder than it may seem since all four (so far) movies in the franchise are so darn good. From the first movie's origins as an under-the-radar film that quietly launched in the fall of 2014 to the latest installment John Wick: Chapter 4's big box office success, the John Wick movies have only increased in popularity and critical acclaim in the nine years it has existed.

Every John Wick movie has been praised for its innovative action and stylish direction, but which one ranks at the top? Is it the original John Wick, which established the series in the first place? Or is it Parabellum, which dramatically expanded the scope and depth of the franchise? The following is a list of all the John Wick movies, ranked in ascending order by their Rotten Tomatoes score. 4. John Wick (86%)

Every decade has plenty of great action movies, but the 2010s featured some genuine stunners. Even amid the bland action that dominates so many superhero franchises, we got plenty of genuinely thrilling set pieces that were largely unrelated to superpowers.

The movies on this list prove that there's still plenty of new things to be done with action as a genre. They're also a reminder that, for all the wonders that CGI can bring, there's often nothing like filming some action against the backdrop of the real world.

Everyone loves a good action movie. From the original Terminator back in 1984 to last year's Brad Pitt-lead Bullet Train, audiences have flocked to see things get blown up real good for decades. It's no secret that action movies usually dominate the box office; after all, would you rather see Bruce Willis sneak around the Nakatomi building in Die Hard or a three-hour movie about shepherds in Siberia?

In the last decade, no action film franchise has quite dominated the charts as the John Wick franchise. From 2014's sleeper hit to 2023's John Wick: Chapter 4, these Keanu Reeves-starring action movies have quietly won over the hearts of fans worldwide. But which one is the most popular? Is it the sequel, John Wick: Chapter 2, or the original John Wick, one of the greatest action movies ever? Using each movie's worldwide box office gross, the following is a list of the most popular John Wick movies in ascending order.

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Rebel moon's r-rated director's cut title seemingly revealed.

The title for Rebel Moon's R-rated director's cut has seemingly been revealed, indicating the upcoming expansion of Part One will be very different.

• A new title for the R-rated cut of Rebel Moon might be Rebel Moon - Chapter One: A Chalice of Blood , hinting at the extreme violence and sexual content in the extended cut.
• The R-rated director's cut of Rebel Moon will be much darker and more graphic than the released PG-13 version.
• The extended R-rated versions might address criticisms of lackluster storylines and characters from the PG-13 editions, potentially setting up a darker future for the franchise.

The title of Rebel Moon 's R-rated director's cut has seemingly been revealed, indicating the upcoming expanded version of Part One: A Child of Fire will be very different. Both films in the sci-fi duology were released on Netflix as PG-13 cuts, both sporting runtimes hovering around 2 hours in length for each movie. However, later this year, both films will be getting R-rated director's cuts which include an extra hour per film, bringing the saga to a six-hour experience.

Now, Film Ratings (via GamesRadar ) reports that the released Rebel Moon - Part One will be getting a name change when the R-rated version comes out. One of the listed alternative names is Rebel Moon - Chapter One: A Chalice of Blood , a far cry from the original title of A Child of Fire . It indicates just how dark the upcoming installment will be, with a title that's much more aligned with the type of movie director Zack Snyder says the new version will be.

What Rebel Moon's R-Rated Title Says About The Director's Cut

Alongside the new title, Film Ratings lists the movie as having " brutal bloody violence and gore, sexual content, graphic nudity and language. " This is much different from the PG-13 version, which didn't contain much blood nor many sexual scenes at all. However, Snyder has previously teased how dark the R-rated version is going to be , confirming there would be violent deaths and sex scenes before the original version was even released. With a dark new title attached, it seems the extended cut will be honoring the many promises its director has made.

While the new version of the movie will be much darker and more graphic, it's unclear if the additional content will help the movie in the eyes of critics. Rebel Moon - Part One reviews are mostly negative, critical of most elements of the film, especially its lackluster story and flat characters. Part Two fared even worse with critics, indicating major flaws in the PG-13 releases of the movies. Although the newer renditions will be longer and more mature than the original versions, it still remains to be seen how well they will address the criticisms of their predecessors.

Snyder has major plans for the franchise, with Rebel Moon - Part Three a possibility in the future. Rebel Moon 's new title will seemingly help define that future, hinting at a further exploration of the Imperium's evil and the darkness still inside Kora from her time with them. This might help bolster the movie compared to its previous rendition, offering a deeper look at its characters and their hatred for the tyrannical group. However, it remains to be seen just how much the R-rated version impacts reception to the budding sci-fi franchise.

The R-rated extended cuts for Rebel Moon - Part One and Rebel Moon - Part Two will be released later this year.

Source: Film Ratings (via GamesRadar )

From director Zack Snyder comes Rebel Moon, a sci-fi action movie set in the depths of space and following a colony that is facing the threat of Regent Balisarius. Sofia Boutella plays a warrior charged with recruiting others in the fight against the tyrant, and his unstoppable forces that are dead set on conquest. 

Ballerina: John Wick Spin-off's Biggest Threat Is A Forgotten $150 Million Spy Thriller

• Ballerina will expand on the John Wick universe with new characters and storylines, but faces potential competition from the movie Red Sparrow.
• The film's plot similarities to Red Sparrow, a thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence, could impact Ballerina's success despite the potential for expansion in the John Wick franchise.
• While Red Sparrow faced lackluster critical reception, Ballerina's connection to the John Wick series gives it an advantage in tone and market appeal.

The John Wick spin-off Ballerina looks set to expand on the extensive lore established in the main series, incorporating new characters and storylines, yet the movie faces a surprising threat from a previous genre hit. Starring Ana de Armas as the titular dancing assassin, the movie will include elements from the main John Wick story, owing to its place in the franchise timeline . However, other aspects of the film's plot suggest connections to other projects beyond the John Wick universe – one of which may pose a particular problem.

As the first film spin-off in the John Wick universe, Ballerina has the potential to significantly expand the franchise after John Wick: Chapter 4 's seemingly definitive end. While it's still unconfirmed whether John Wick himself is actually dead, the franchise will have to move beyond star Keanu Reeves at some point in order to continue. Following a new protagonist in the form of de Armas' Rooney is the ideal way to do this. However, although Ballerina 's plot remains under wraps, what little is known about the film suggests that one of its biggest obstacles to success actually has nothing to do with the wider John Wick series.

Ballerina Sounds A Lot Like Jennifer Lawrence's Red Sparrow

Ballerina 's combination of a dancing assassin, a clandestine society of undercover operatives, and a female protagonist who embarks on a dangerous mission for the good of her family bears remarkable similarities with Jennifer Lawrence's unsung 2018 thriller, Red Sparrow . The movie, which made $150 million at the box office, received mixed reviews from critics – scoring just 45% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. However, while this is much less impressive than the rest of the John Wick series, the movie has clear narrative connections to Ballerina 's premise.

Red Sparrow stars Lawrence as a ballerina, who after witnessing an assassination is forced to choose between death and becoming a " sparrow " – a specialist undercover operative with expertise in extracting information. Although not as superpowered as many of the assassins in John Wick , Lawrence's Dominika Egorova is shown to be more than capable of handling herself, killing several people throughout the story. Although Red Sparrow is less stylized than the John Wick series, the similarities it shares with Ballerina 's planned story are more than enough to warrant comparison.

Red Sparrow's Failure Is A Potential Problem For Ballerina

Despite making $150 million at the global box office, other aspects of Red Sparrow 's performance are a potentially worrying indicator for Ballerina . The movie was made for $69 million , meaning that it barely made enough to break even. Considering the upward trajectory of the John Wick films , which have collectively made over $1 billion on equally mid-tier budgets (the most expensive being John Wick: Chapter 4 's $100 million), a similar return for Ballerina would be a disappointing precedent ahead of other potential spin-offs.

Likewise, Red Sparrow 's critical performance could be a concern, considering the film's narrative similarities. Although Jennifer Lawrence's performance was widely praised, many critics felt that the rest of the movie was overly complicated and failed to come together . The fact that Ballerina faces the dual challenge of trying to tell its own story while simultaneously acknowledging established events in the wider John Wick universe could produce a similar outcome, with complexity already proving to be an Achilles heel within Ballerina 's genre.

Red Sparrow Creates An Opportunity For Ballerina

There's no doubt that having a ballet-based action thriller fail to make much of an impact culturally, critically, or commercially is a worrying precedent ahead of Ballerina 's proposed 2025 release . However, despite the potential pitfalls demonstrated by Red Sparrow 's underwhelming performance, the movie also suggests that there is an opportunity for the film to succeed. Despite middling reviews and a generally bleak story, the fact remains that Red Sparrow still managed to break even – highlighting that there is an appetite for the type of story both it and Ballerina want to tell.

In some ways, the fact that Red Sparrow did not establish itself as the definitive dance-inspired assassin movie means that there is still a gap in the market for the John Wick spin-off to fill. Had Red Sparrow been an overwhelming success, it's likely that Ballerina would have been forced to find a different schtick for its main character – despite ballet's connection to the rest of the John Wick series, as established in Chapter 3 . As it stands, Ballerina can recycle the trope established in the Jennifer Lawrence movie without risking accusations of copying another movie's success.

Ballerina Cast & Character Guide: Ana De Armas Leads John Wick Spinoff

Ballerina's john wick connection can improve on red sparrow's formula.

Although Red Sparrow does present a potential problem for Ballerina , the spin-off's established franchise connection gives it a good chance of success. As confirmed by the critical consensus, the main problems with Red Sparrow were its dark tone and overly complex espionage story . While the John Wick series does contain some dark themes, it is generally a much more lighthearted franchise, with an emphasis on stylish action rather than grueling torture and sexual violence. As proven by previous Wick films, this is a comparatively popular approach at the box office.

The fact that Ballerina will be set within John Wick 's deliberately tongue-in-cheek world of secret assassins – complete with gun-toting sommeliers and aristocratic pretensions – means that it already has a tonal advantage compared to Red Sparrow . As a rule, dour spy dramas that revel in extreme violence can struggle to perform at the box office. The John Wick series has proven time and time again that hyperbolic, highly choreographed action sequences are much more appealing to audiences – a trend Ballerina has every chance of continuing.

The narrative similarities between Ballerina and Red Sparrow will make a comparison between the two movies an interesting exercise, once the de Armas movie comes out. However, the clear tonal differences between the 2018 Lawrence movie and the rest of the John Wick series suggest that the spin-off is already at an advantage. Ballerina may have some obstacles to overcome, but the success of the pre-existing franchise suggests that it has a great precedent to follow.

Director Len Wiseman

Release Date June 7, 2024

Cast Anjelica Huston, Lance Reddick, Ian McShane, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Norman Reedus, Keanu Reeves, Gabriel Byrne, Ana De Armas

Genres Thriller, Action

Franchise(s) John Wick